Star Gazing by Linda Gillard

This is the second Linda Gillard novel I have read, and I think I preferred this one, Star Gazing to A Lifetime Burning. However, I highly recommend both books.

Here is Amazon’s synopsis:

Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne’s passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter’s night. Whilst Marianne has had her share of men attracted to her because they want to rescue her, Keir makes no concession to her condition. He is abrupt to the point of rudeness, and yet oddly kind. But can Marianne trust her feelings for this reclusive stranger who wants to take a blind woman to his island home on Skye, to ’show’ her the stars?

This is an incredibly well written book. Gillard takes very sensitive issues such as blindness, the Piper Alpha crisis, pregnancy, death and love and talks about them brilliantly. She is not insensitive at all. This is a book that a lot of research has gone into and the descriptions are so real that my imagination was perfectly satisfied. For example, she describes the Piper Alpha memorial so well that the way I had imagined it was exactly what it looked like.

I love the way Keir is written. Being blind is something that is hard to comprehend to the sighted, yet Gillard did this magnificently. She pointed out things which in hindsight seem very obvious, but I hadn’t the faintest idea that blind people cannot comprehend colour or landscape if they have always been blind, purely because I have never thought about.  Linda deals with this well, just by bringing this to my attention. Yet more than that, she shows a way of seeing when you are blind, and that is through music. Keir is great at this for Marianne, he seems to care and try hard for her, to help her comprehend and understand. This was done so well I keep catching myself trying to describe sights through music. This book has made a last impression on me.

Gillard does jump between characters and the narrative, but the use of fonts and sub-titles makes this fine and very easy to follow. I quite liked this style of writing.

The other character I loved was Marianne’s sister Louisa. A bit of a romantic and fantasist, yet had everyone’s best interests at heart and was always there for her sister in times of need. What a beautiful character.

This is not a long book – 261 pages and such a good book it is a very quick read.

I thoroughly recommend this book, it was amazing. One of the best books I have read in a long time.

10/10

Two Women by Marianne Fredriksson

Date of Publication: 1999, Ballantine Books

Number of Pages: 195

Synopsis (from back cover): They meet on a spring day in the local garden center: Inge, a native Swede, lovely and refined, a woman ruled by reason and her own deeply held moral beliefs; Mira, a Chilean immigrant who still feels out of place in the cold Scandinavian north. Through many shared afternoons in Inge’s garden, Mira slowly reveals the horrors of a shadowed past and the heartbreak involving her beloved daughter. As Mira and her family begin a wrenching journey of discovery, Inge unwittingly uncovers secrets in her own life that make her question the very order of her world. An elegant novel of time and memory, love and distance, and the wounds they create and conceal, Two Women is Marianne Fredriksson’s most affecting work of fiction to date.

Review: There are many novels out there that deal with relationships between women, but Two Women is unlike any of them. This book deals with extraordinary issues, like rape, torture, and incest, as well as the usual issues, like marriage, sex, and trust. Inge and Mira are very different. One is restrained by her logic, while the other is caught in a web of violent emotions stemming from her tragic past. Important questions arise early: Should the past remain buried? Or should it be sought? How easily should we trust other people? At what point does love become a burden?

Like all Fredriksson’s books, love is dealt with openly and frankly, almost unrealistically. There’s none of the common coyness that one usually encounters, both in books and in the real world. Instead, people are heartbreakingly honest with each other, if not entirely honest with themselves. Lessons are learned by everyone, and often in unexpected ways. One character finds his true self by learning  to paraglide , while another finds rebirth in a violent storm. In the end, the two families are strengthened by their connection, yet their imperfections persist, making them believable. Any reader will find themselves relating to these characters, despite their sometimes extraordinary circumstances.

Rating: 8.5/10

Reviewed by Sarah