Oceana9's review
A Death in the Family
by James Agee
Oceana9's review
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Oceana9's review
rating:
recommended for: the emotionally unafraid
I feel a great keening of the spirit. In its quaint (but also ballsy), early twentieth-century way, this is one of the truest, rarest books I have ever read. Even as it is unabashedly poetic, with crystalline, carefully-chosen words, the plot absorbs the reader from word one. And of course in its moment-by-moment account of what it is like, for the first time, to experience the death of a central figure in one's life, we are brought back to our own, most private memories, the ones kept in a darkened room with a locked door and a guard: the last moments with loves of our lives as they were in human form, and the strange days after they died.
