So I Am Glad: A Novel - Softcover

Kennedy, A. L. L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375707247 ISBN 13: 9780375707247

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

The ferociously talented author of Original Bliss and On Bullfighting offers this haunting tale of two forlorn people who find in each other a hope and love as genuine and original as this marvelous book in which they come to life.

M. Jennifer Wilson is a mid-thirties radio announcer living in Glasgow. She shares a house with Art and Liz, two typical Scotland thirtysomethings, but her life takes a drastic turn with the arrival of her new housemate, an elusive man who glows in the dark and can't remember his name. He soon reveals himself to be none other than Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, the famed writer and duelist of eighteenth-century France, and what unfolds is a love story stark and surreal, tender and humane.

About this title

Review:

There is no other word to describe what A.L. Kennedy does with her fiction than alchemy. How else to explain a novel like Original Bliss, which combined the basest of materials--an abused and depressed Glasgow housewife and a pornography-addicted professor--and conjured up literary gold? In So I Am Glad Kennedy does it again, rendering a remarkable love story out of two characters who, on the face of it, are not terribly lovable. Jennifer, for example, is a young woman who lacks what most people have: "whole hordes of feelings, all barrelling round inside them like tireless moles."

As I write this, I can see extremely clearly that nothing terribly bad has ever happened to me. I can't recall a single moment of damage that could have turned me out to be who I am today. I can dig down as deep as there is to dig inside me and there truly is nothing there, not a squeak. For no good reason, no reason at all, I am empty. I don't have any moles.

Jennifer, however, turns out to be a less than reliable narrator when it comes to the facts of her own life. Her parents, for example, had the damaging hobby of making her watch them have sex when she was a child. And now she has a few sexual quirks of her own, chief among them a taste for inflicting pain on her partners. If Jennifer is hardly the stuff of romantic fiction, neither is the man who drops suddenly and quite literally into her life: Martin, a sweating, frightened amnesiac who eventually claims he is Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

From this rather outlandish premise, Kennedy builds an intricate tale of mad love, bad love--and in the end, the love that heals all wounds. Is Savinien insane? A ghost? The literal resurrection of a long-dead French writer? Not even he seems to know for sure. As for why he's here now: "I must have been a catastrophe--He made me come back." And certainly Savinien has as many bad qualities as Jennifer--a killer in his past life, a drug addict in this one. And yet only in each other can these two damaged people find their salvation. What makes this story work is Kennedy's quirky humor and stunning prose style combined with a wholly original point of view. She can be every bit as tough as fellow Scottish writers Irvine Welsh or Duncan McLean, but she has a surprising tenderness, as well, investing even the most brutal moments with humanity and a frisson of wonder. --Alix Wilber

From the Back Cover:

"Captivating.... Funny, mysterious and so original that it is easy to suspend disbelief."
--Chicago Tribune

"A love story that’s highly imaginative and surprisingly poignant...yet amusingly ironic in tone."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Kennedy...writes with passion and directness, taking risks that would leave other writers squirming."
--San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375707247
• ISBN 13: 9780375707247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288