The Gloaming

There are many terrific writers like Melanie Finn but too few get the attention they deserve or find their audience. Two Dollar Radio, with the tagline Books too loud to Ignore, published The Gloaming, a small mystery with a big heart and an intimate glimpse of both insiders and outsiders from Switzerland to Africa. The oddly and appropriately named Pilgrim Jones has been abandoned by her husband for another woman, while traveling in Switzerland. To add insult to injury, she is subsequently involved in the death of three children, but she has no recollection of the accident nor does she fully comprehend the consequences. In despair over her own life, her unborn children and the victims, everything seems more oppressive, more furtive and mysterious, and in this, Finn is especially good at evoking the scene. She writes frequently about the play of light and dark, and the similarly conflict between people, slowly establishing a powerful sense of place as well as the flaws, and flightiness, of humans outside their comfort zones. Pilgrim takes off impulsively, and remains, in a small town in Tanzania, where she becomes embroiled in all sorts of personal mysteries, until she disappears, and the people in her midst take up the story. With subtle but steadily increasing tension, the narrative shifts time and place and voice, but the story remains cohesive, if you read carefully, and make sure to read every word, as this Kenyan-born American writer is one to watch [this is only her second novel]. Even when she slips into the abstract, or especially then, her descriptive language is a delight for the literary reader.

What a gorgeous writer Melanie Finn is, what an extraordinary ability with language she has. Rarely do I give a book 5 stars (I've been accused on here of being a 'tough grader,' and I am) but this writing deserves every star. Finn is elegant, attuned, graceful, clinically harsh when she needs to be. Descriptions do not spare an extra word; they are perfect in their simplicity, sometimes deeply painful, hugely evocative. She paints her imagery so simply, with such a gut punch, that I'm a bit in awe of her. There's great sadness in this novel, and at times it reminded me of Camus in its existential distance. But the story is always driven by hard, human emotion, even when the protagonist has gone dead in her heart (the result of trauma laid upon trauma). I was enthralled by this book, even when, two-thirds of the way in, the single narrative line shifts to other voices. At first I thought, oh no...PLOT! She felt the need to add a plot, oh no! But because the characters are so beautifully rendered, mysterious, suffering or raging (or both), I couldn't put the book down. I am just wildly impressed. Brava, Ms Flinn! Write another, please!

I wasn't crazy about the multiple viewpoints, but they did not distract enough from the lovely prose. The story is about guilt and the attempt to live with it somehow. There are no happy endings, but the story is not maudlin.

Wow. It's rare to see such beauty--even if a terrible beauty--in a book; I didn't want to stop nor for the book to end. Finn's novel is painful, difficult, confusing...and ultimately mesmerizing. Even while I wanted to turn away from the characters' flawed humanity or pain, I couldn't, as if I have been made part of the narrative as a sympathetic witness or one of purported ghosts in the novel that watch over others' lives. While I was often confused by the switches in time and character point-of-view, I learned to enjoy the way, just when I thought I had the plot structure figured out, Finn would pivot the narrative in an unexpected direction like a dancer making an unexpected move that only seemed natural after it was executed. Some readers will feel the ending lacks…resolution? Not sure. In a novel that at its heart is about the hard (sometimes impossible) road to redemption and atonement, the most it can perhaps offer is a searing portrait of the terrible beauty of humanity itself.No, this is not an easy read in subject matter or plot--this writer aspired to more than that and she achieved it.

I just ordered Melanie Finn's new novel, The Hare, and felt compelled to stop by here to declare that this thoughtful, searing, and imaginative novel is highly UNDERRATED. 40 reviews?!?