In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She's come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefevre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He's a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she's the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist. Valerie's thinking about Gerard on assignment in her native New York City, where their son Andre works. In New York City, an airplane has plunged into a skyscraper, and in the short time before anyone understands the significance of this event, Valerie's mind begins to spiral in and out of the present moment, circling around her intense memories of her father's death, her youthful relationship with troubled Matthew, and her pregnancy with his child, the crisis that led to her marriage to Gerard, and her fears for the safety of her son Andre and his partner James. Unable to reach her loved ones, Valerie finds memory intruding on a surreal and dreamlike present until at last she connects with Gerard and the final horror of that day.
Praise
"With shattering grace Giangrande divines catastrophic grief, the redemptive power of ephemeral joys, and the interconnectedness of all things as past and present conflate in terrorism's chaos. Memory becomes balm as life, all life, is porous. Exquisite, devastating, this book is a bomb."
—Carol Bruneau, author of These Good Hands
"An elegy for lost innocence, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is at once extremely sad and exquisitely hopeful. Its hopefulness resides mainly in the stubborn resonance of the quotidian, and in the kind hearts and good wills of those who refuse to accept evil, no matter how often it crashes into their lives. Carole Giandgrande has achieved a great deal in this short, beautiful book; confronting the incomprehensible without despair and describing profound grief without sentimentality."
—Susan Glickman, author of The Tale-Teller and Safe as Houses
"All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is above all a compassionate book. Carole Giangrande takes that horrifying day—September 11, 2001—and filters it though the consciousness of a woman, Valerie, whose loved ones are in Manhattan as the crisis unfolds. She doesn’t know whether they are dead or alive, and Giangrande is masterful in her expression of Valerie’s surreal state of mind. The book captures with gut-wrenching acuity the anxiety, fear and distress of not only that particular day but of our current social climate as well. No one is safe anymore—was anyone, ever?—and our perceptions rule us: “The truth was that everything you looked at had to pass through the lens of what you imagined you saw. It was up to you to decide what was real.” Timely words from a timely book."
—Eva Tihanyi, author of The Largeness of Rescue
Paperback, 200 pages
Published
April 10th 2017
by Inanna Publications
ISBN 1771333618
(ISBN13: 9781771333610)
About the Author
Born and raised in the New York City area, Carole Giangrande is a Toronto-based novelist and author of nine books, including the award-winning novella A Gardener on the Moon, the novels An Ordinary Star and A Forest Burning, the short story collection, Missing Persons and the novellas Here Comes The Dreamer and Midsummer. Her third novel, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air will be published in Spring 2017. She's worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio (Canada's public broadcaster) and her fiction, poetry, articles and reviews have appeared in Canada’s major journals and newspapers (Her essay "Goshawk" was Lyric Essay Award Winner in the Eastern Iowa Review, 2016). She's read her fiction at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre, at the Banff Centre for the Arts (as an Artist-in-Residence), the University of Toronto, on radio and at numerous public venues. She has recently completed another novel.
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My Thoughts
As she walked uphill on Rue Marechal Foch in the old town of Saint-Pierre, Valerie heard clocks.
Valerie and husband Gerard are adrift and unmoored and losing sight of one another when an airliner crashes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, leaving them shaken and grasping for anything to keep them from going under. The past blends with the present, one nearly indistinguishable from the other.
Memory was too aggressive. It would root you out with a wild growl, sniffing and pawing at the ground. It would make you afraid.This is one of those tough books to review, because I feel that just about anything I share will be too much. Other than flashbacks to the past, the bulk of the story only covers a couple of days. So I fear if I'm not careful, I'll ruin the story. But the story follows Valerie and her husband Gerard, her friend Matthew from the past, and Valerie and Gerard's son Andre.
At eight forty-six a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, the watch stopped.
Monday, May 15th: Readaholic Zone
Tuesday, May 16th: Tina Says…
Wednesday, May 17th: Literary Quicksand
Tuesday, May 23rd: Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World
Friday, May 26th: Books and Bindings
Thursday, May 25th: Girl Who Reads
Monday, May 29th: From the TBR Pile
Wednesday, May 31st: A Bookish Way of Life
Wednesday, May 31st: 5 Minutes For Books
My final word: This is a very slow-moving story. Cleverly derived, it's gentle and guttural-- primal even, like a gut-punch. It's a bit disjointed, with little snippets of dialogue and blips in time, and somewhat ethereal and mystical. The first half was almost too slow for me, but I really liked the second half of the story, and the last third was my favorite. At times quite powerful, this is a great story about acceptance, balance, and settling debts. The cyclic nature of life, and how everything comes back around again. A touching story.
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My Rating:
The Cerebral Girl is a forty-something blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.
I received a copy of this book to review through TLC Book Tours and the publisher, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.
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1 comment:
Thanks for being a part of the tour!
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