Name: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Rating: 3.929936305732484 (157 reviews)
ISBN: 9781555977412

Max Porter

Originally published: London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2015.

A Novel

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Mari-Claire Parrin

Júlia Bertoldi

Celine

There's grief and there's impractical obsession.

Levi-Mae 

‘For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.’ 

‘She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.’

‘and we are fifty feet out to sea being chewed apart by sadness.’

‘I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.’

‘Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.’

Nataly

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

yaya

Beatrix

In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

The house becomes a physical encyclopaedia of no longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away.

She won't ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus). 

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm). 

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday. 

Head down, tot-along, looking. Head down, hop-down, totter. Look up. LOUD, HARD AND INDIGNANT KRAAH NOTES' (Collins Guide to Birds, p. 45).

 I want to give you everything I have because you are the most precious and beautiful boys. You remind me of everything I have ever been interested in' she said.

We made love and I kissed her shoulder blades and reminded her of the story of my parents lying to me about children growing wings and she said, 'My body is not bird-like.' 

We made love. The wing story. My body is not bird-like.

She is Mrs Laocoön, standing on the beach with her arms crossed, saying, 'Look at those bloody boys,’ and we are fifty feet out to sea being chewed apart by sadness.

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal. In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

I couldn't put it down. It's heart-wrenching and deep and funny - all those things.

Tabea

Niki Sotiropoulou-Nassika

what an awesome book and what it means for a book to be a crow

sarah cherian

Fine diary of "what Time? there is no stopping".

martian1138

TOCDA*

Fine diary of "what Time? there is no stopping".

Love loved - would love to reread in future - I feel like u could get something different from it each time 

Fun magic realism, very small chapters/quick to read / the crow hates plot so don't try and find it 

maddy rowley

Love loved - would love to reread in future - I feel like u could get something different from it each time 

Fun magic realism, very small chapters/quick to read / the crow hates plot so don't try and find it 

ephe

kayla 

Riya

Ok so this was something different and unique, not different in a bad way though. I loved the exploration of grief through different povs, how the passing of days were shown in a subtle way. Like how the author never told the time frame of family’s mourning because we can’t put any specific time stamp on the duration of someone’s grieving period. 

Then there’s the crow, who is just an embodiment of the father’s grief, and helps him and his children to be normal. The father gives free reign to the mourning part of his brain to Crow, by having him help to write his book and pour out his most vulnerable and raw thoughts. He couldn’t show sadness unabashedly so he conjured up Crow to give some ounce of physicality to his pain, which was beautifully shown by the author.

By the end of the novel, you could see that they might have been in a better place but they were still grieving since you can never truly stop grieving; you can just become comfortable with it. As it was rightly said in the book- “Grief is a long term project.”

Stefano

Maasje Steur

this was a startlingly beautiful and intriguing entertainment of grief. short, cryptic, but a very well told story of the universal feelings of loss. I especially love the narration. who are the boys? which one of them is talking? if we don't know which one is even talking, how can we trust the crow is real? Porter's writing begs these questions, which are interesting to try to answer.

heleen de boever

Midori Kobayashi

how to deal with grief- question we have all wondered about. this book and it's grief counsellor- a crow, tell us that. it was poignant it was vague at times but overall left me thinking a lot of thoughts at 2AM so.

Shona Tiger

Hellboy TCR

Its a 3.5 star book which I thought was going to fail for the way grief(a crow that talks) was portrayed, but man, the writer's avoided most of the traps that could come up in such a narration. There were beautifully written passages and touching moments all through. But sometimes it also tries be a bit clever. Almost a 4 star and a great way to launch a writing career. More on it later.

High Fidelity

Pricam o muskarcu koji ostaje bez zene.
Prica o dva decaka koji ostaju bez majke.
U njihov skrhani zivot ulazi vrana koja je stvarna, koja je metafora, koja je tu za razgovor, koja je tu da bude dadilja, vrana koja je tu da ih ujede za srce I da im pokaze kako je tuga dugotrajni projekat.
Jako lepo napisano, velika preporuka.

Fraser Simons

For a book about grief it sure doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. But also opaque to me, in a weird way, since it’s also gripping on audio. I like sad things usually, and I liked the concept of this book quite a bit. I suspect it might be a bit disappointing because of how hyped this is for me. 

I have had it recommended to me about 25 times. And I rate based on expectations. 3 being, it met my expectations, which is hard to do when it’s so highly recommended. But also felt a bit sad I didn’t connect with it more so I could be on the same train as the other friends, who absolutely adore it. The nice thing is that at two hours long I can easily revisit it at some point and perhaps like it more, having my expectations adjusted for that reading of it. We shall see.

Jenna

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is a strange little book. It follows a dad and his two sons as they mourn the sudden and unexpected death of his wife. In the book, grief takes the form of a big crow named Crow. Thinking back on it, I'm not sure if he was a giant crow or a regular sized crow. For some reason in my mind I thought of him as a human sized crow, but yeah maybe that isn't accurate. 

The writing in this book is poetic, which is fitting because the father is a Ted Hughes scholar. Many of the chapters share touching and insightful moments of a family dealing with the pain of losing a loved one. However, the chapters from Crow's perspective were often erratic and nonsensical. I'm not sure if I just didn't get it or if there was nothing to get.

This book is a quick read and I think many people would enjoy it. I did enjoy it, despite the Crow chapters being weird. It wasn't the idea of a talking babysitter grief Crow that was too weird... it was the writing in the Crow chapters that I didn't really enjoy.

I'll end this review with one of my favorite quotes from the book (not from a crow chapter) to give you a little taste of the beautiful parts. "I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her."

nina

i liked some of the prose. the characters felt contrived sometimes. it was very self-indulgent and i'm sylvia plath all the way.

Emmett

As sly and spare and painful as a sweet, thin knife - this slim, beautiful book hides a darkness of its own, amid playful rhymes, and everyday sounds and sights, attesting to how grief changes everything and changes nothing. Porter's writing is uncannily reminiscent of Hughes' own, and stylistically amorphous, hovering on the threshold in a poetic poem, where a single gem of a word draws blood.

carla watson 

it was was good but i wouldn’t read it again because i don’t think i understood what it was about as i wasn’t really paying attention definitely something different

Nicole A

This book describes the sensations of grief on point. Although the story moved so quickly, the content made me want to slow down. It contains novels and collections of poetry - odd read but definitely a good one.

Patty M.

Around the Year in 52 Books
Week 15 Prompt
A book with a unique format/writing structure

This book was written in the form of poetry, sometimes versed, sometimes not. Strange use of onomatopoeia. Came across choppy and disjointed. Interesting, but not memorable.

Olivera Mitić

I'm not sure if people who have never lost anyone will be able to get this book. I'm not trying to be pretentious, I just honestly don't think you could see how accurate this is unless you have grieved yourself. 
Personally, I lost two very important family members 4 years ago. They died within a year of eachother and it felt something like this book does. I hope I won't have to re-live that feeling any time soon, but it's also weirdly comforting to see that other people out there had horrible experiences that are similar to mine.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers A Novel

Reviews

Highlights