“Carellin Brooks’ marvellous and brooding novel, sparking after yet another downpour, offers a natural history of rain and breakups. Nobody, not even the rain, has such nerve.” -Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces Her forbearing heroine bikes through torrents, dodges puddles, keeps moving through bitterness and weather. “Is there a worse city in which to suffer a vindictive, litigated break up than unrelentingly sodden Vancouver? In these one hundred intimate chapters, Carellin Brooks has convinced me no. “A quiet and meditative book that reads like a mystery: How do we find ourselves-sometimes simultaneously-moving both toward and away from the things that matter to us most?” -Johanna Skibsrud, 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner for The Sentimentalists Readers will engage with Brooks’ poetic and playful constraint that unfolds chapter by chapter, where the narrator’s compulsive cataloguing of rain’s vicissitudes forms a kind of quiet meditation: an acknowledgement of the ongoing weight of sadness, the texture of it, and its composition-not only emotional weight, but also the weight of all the stupid little things a person deals with when they’re rebuilding a life. With elliptical prose reminiscent of Elizabeth Smart’s beloved novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, One Hundred Days of Rain exposes the inner workings of a life that has come apart. Caught between the two poles of weather and mood, the narrator is not alone: whether riding the bus with her small child, searching for an apartment to rent, or merely calculating out the cost of meager lunches, the world forever intrudes, as both a comfort and a torment. Her melancholic mood alike undergoes subtle variations that sometimes echo, sometimes contrast with her surroundings. As she wakes each day to encounter Vancouver’s sky and city streets, the narrator notices that the rain, so apparently unchanging, is in fact kaleidoscopic. Mourning her recent disastrous breakup, the narrator must rebuild a life from the bottom up. In prose by turns haunting and crystalline, Carellin Brooks’ One Hundred Days of Rain enumerates an unnamed narrator’s encounters with that most quotidian of subjects: rain. But it rained for a hundred days, that year, which was enough-more than enough, even. Winner of the 2016 ReLit Award for FictionĤ9th Shelf Most Anticipated Spring 2015 Fiction Selectionĭid she say, at the beginning, that it rained every day? She was wrong. Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2016 Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |