Sand filled the bed, tracing a yellowish line from my sweaty back to his as he slept beside me. I turned to look at Lorenzo. A streak of light from the streetlamps, filtering in through a crack in the ramshackle blinds, illuminated the wet grains along his neck and back and his folded arms, as tidy as a text message.
An edition of Hollow Heart
(2015)
Hollow Heart
by Viola Di Grado
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In this courageous, inventive, irreverent, and shrewd novel, Viola Di Grado tells the story of a suicide and what follows. She gives voice to an astonishing vision of life after life, portraying the awful longing and sense of loss that plague the dead, together with the solitude provoked by the impossibility of communicating. The afterlife itself is seen as a dark, seething place where one is preyed upon by the cruel and unrelenting elements. Hollow Heart will frighten as it provokes, enlighten as it causes concern. If ever there were a novel that follows Kafka's prescription for a book to be an axe for the frozen sea within us, it is Hollow Heart.
In this, Di Grado's second novel after 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, the twenty-seven-year-old prodigy gives proof of her reputation as a singular and explosive talent.
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Subjects
fiction, translated text, afterlife, Fiction, general, Fiction, Suicide, Future life, Italian fictionPeople
Sinéad O'ConnorTimes
1986-2015| Edition | Availability |
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1
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Excerpts
Page 55,
added by lalala.
nice language
Boxing up all your feelings in a single phrase is very convenient: it's an insurance policy against the mysteries of the subconscious. I relied upon that phrase where everyone takes shelter, that well-heated room where one can sit rapt in prayer. I relied upon my desire and upon my cloistered state within my desire. I trusted the self-abnegation that you could build inside, already thoroughly tested over the millennia by human animals on themselves: I thought I'd found safety.
Page 57,
added by lalala.
thoughtful
Its loneliness in the bowels of the earth and the worm invasions certainly didn't do it any good, but I didn't let appearances deceive me: I liked seeing my body open up, revealed little by little behind the flesh, like a confession. It was full of organs: that is the true meaning of inner beauty.
Page 80,
added by lalala.
interesting observation
She'd put up a sheet of paper behind the counter that said AWAKE AND SING, YE THAT DWELL IN DUST: FOR THY DEW IS AS THE DEW OF HERBS, AND THE EARTH SHALL CAST OUT THE DEAD. ISAIAH 26:19. "What's that?" "Resurrection of the bodies. The Bible is very clear on this point. We shall rise again, Dorotea, we shall rise again."
Page 83,
added by lalala.
theme of hope
I myself, or the world, go on as before. And to think that I expected so much from death. At the very least, a conclusion. I believed in an end. Deep down I was an idealist, and I had no idea.
Page 86,
added by lalala.
ironic summation
He shut the door. I could have passed through it and gone back to be with him, but it struck me as an obscene act. My immateriality had never before struck me as so vulgar. I stayed inside the door. I stayed the door . . . I thought: "The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man my come in. Isaiah 24:10."
Page 155,
added by lalala.
feels real
It was so sad, sad, sad to be able to touch only in one direction.
Page 156,
added by lalala.
emotive
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| September 21, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
| August 4, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
| July 7, 2016 | Edited by lalala | excerpts |
| July 7, 2016 | Edited by lalala | description |
| July 7, 2016 | Created by lalala | Added new book. |