Review for 'My Name is Rebecca'
“… I remember her in my very bones, in my very flesh … I remember her absence in my flesh and bones, in my blood and brain.”
Belfast, 1983. Rebecca’s twin sister, Ruth, is killed in a bomb blast. Now, over twenty years later, Ruth’s killer is released according to the Good Friday Agreement. Rebecca, feeling the insistent tug of memory and grief, looking for relief, travels to the sea cliffs of Slieve League with childhood friends, James and Robert. There, she experiences a kind of epiphany that becomes a touchstone throughout the remainder of the novel.
“… something has changed in an instant, and the world is suddenly crystalline … it is as if a veil has been torn in two in front of her eyes and life itself has been exorcised abruptly … she feels joy; she is joyful. She feels drunk, from joy.”
This is a long, slow burn of a novel. It reads as prose poetry - Burnside is, in fact, a poet - using the repetition of words, of phrases, of scenes, with slight changes and additions of details to emphasize ideas and themes. If you are looking for action you will find, instead, thought and conversation. Experiences are considered from different angles, multiple times. Burnside gently eschews narrative, timeline, and perspective expectations to fully explore themes, particularly in the second half of the novel. The use of language, the writing in general, is exquisite without being overdone.
My Name Is Rebecca examines grief, mourning, loss, and memory. It delves into trauma, individual and collective, centered on the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a nation grappling with decades of violence, uncertainty, tension. It considers whether it is possible to move past that, to heal or, if not to heal, to maintain a kind of resilience and move on.
Thank you @bigdaveroy and Hobart Books for sending me this pensive, lingering poem of a novel.
(ID: A green book with a silhouetted figure walking into the shadows held up by a hand in front of a frosted window pane in a brown door.)
Belfast, 1983. Rebecca’s twin sister, Ruth, is killed in a bomb blast. Now, over twenty years later, Ruth’s killer is released according to the Good Friday Agreement. Rebecca, feeling the insistent tug of memory and grief, looking for relief, travels to the sea cliffs of Slieve League with childhood friends, James and Robert. There, she experiences a kind of epiphany that becomes a touchstone throughout the remainder of the novel.
“… something has changed in an instant, and the world is suddenly crystalline … it is as if a veil has been torn in two in front of her eyes and life itself has been exorcised abruptly … she feels joy; she is joyful. She feels drunk, from joy.”
This is a long, slow burn of a novel. It reads as prose poetry - Burnside is, in fact, a poet - using the repetition of words, of phrases, of scenes, with slight changes and additions of details to emphasize ideas and themes. If you are looking for action you will find, instead, thought and conversation. Experiences are considered from different angles, multiple times. Burnside gently eschews narrative, timeline, and perspective expectations to fully explore themes, particularly in the second half of the novel. The use of language, the writing in general, is exquisite without being overdone.
My Name Is Rebecca examines grief, mourning, loss, and memory. It delves into trauma, individual and collective, centered on the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a nation grappling with decades of violence, uncertainty, tension. It considers whether it is possible to move past that, to heal or, if not to heal, to maintain a kind of resilience and move on.
Thank you @bigdaveroy and Hobart Books for sending me this pensive, lingering poem of a novel.
(ID: A green book with a silhouetted figure walking into the shadows held up by a hand in front of a frosted window pane in a brown door.)
No comments have been added yet.
