The Life-Writer - Softcover

David Constantine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1905583745 ISBN 13: 9781905583744

Publisher: Comma Press, 2015

Synopsis

Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met a hitchhike through France that he had tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life. Picking her way through bundles of letters and postcards from five decades earlier, Katrin begins to uncover a life she knew nothing of, and an expedition that exceeded anything her professional, biographical subjects ever undertook. Think of me then, her husband beseeched her, at the roadside, thumb in the air, gaily setting forth, never forget me then.

David Constantine s passionate tale of grief and rediscovery marks only the second foray into novel writing for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim. A great work of literature, he reminds us, is never finished, it is a living and moving thing, alive in all its parts in every fibre , designed to be inexhaustible and to outlive. As Katrin s journey proves, the lives of those we love are similarly inexhaustible, they keep on offering up new revelations, possessing the people they leave behind, and forever needing to be re-written.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Following the final illness and death of her husband Eric, Katrin—a writer of brief lives of minor figures of European Romanticism—decides to fight against his absence by writing the story of his life. Desperate to know Eric as he had been before she loved him, to fetch his early years into those that she must now face without him—Think of me then, Katrin, Eric told her on his deathbed, never forget me then, that lad gaily assuming the land and its roads and traffic would never be anything but kind—she begins, through letters and diaries and conversations with his childhood friends, to reconstruct a pivotal period of his life, uncovering an early affair Eric had with a Parisian artist. As the young couple's increasingly impossible love rushes toward its devastating conclusion, past and present intermesh in unexpected ways and Katrin begins to understand how that period of Eric's youth impacted Katrin's love for him and the marriage the two of them shared. Passionate, profoundly moving, and lyrically written, The Life-Writer offers up an unforgettably heartbreaking portrait of a brilliant woman who grieves for her beloved by writing what others wouldn't dare: the story of his first true love.

About the Author

David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and translator. The title story of his North American debut collection of short fiction, In Another Country: Selected Stories (Biblioasis, 2015) was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated feature film 45 Years. He is the author of one previous novel, Davies, as well as four collections of short stories in the UK, including Back at the Spike, Under the Dam, The Shieling, and the winner of the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. His collections of poetry include Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He is also a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux, and Jaccottet. He lives in Oxford, where until 2012 he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Comma Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1905583745
• ISBN 13: 9781905583744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224