The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (an almost review)

You know, for the past week or two I’ve been walking around thinking I’d fallen at the first hurdle with this reading project. In a way I have – in that it’s taken me three weeks or so and I still haven’t finished the first book on the list – but the truth is, I don’t intend to finish it. So there.

I take this as a sign of growth, actually.

I really struggled with this book. I couldn’t force myself to be interested in any of the characters. None of them seem to actually do anything, and it felt very much like work to make myself pick the thing up and read it. Every time I did pick it up, half of my mind was occupied with thinking of things I’d rather be reading.

So I stopped.

I read about a third of the book before I put it down permanently. I’m sure I was probably only a few pages away from something interesting – some fascinating little character quirk or wrinkle of conversation – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of forcing myself past any more boring to get there.

And that’s a real step forward for me.

I used to be of the mind that if I started reading a book, no matter how much I disliked it, I would finish the damned thing. In fact, this is only the second novel in my life that I’ve started and not finished. The first was the fourth book in Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series which was so poorly written that I have to suspect it was published as a practical joke (on readers) or that Ms. Auel had some sort of ‘leverage’ on someone high up over at Random House.

The Death of the Heart is not nearly as bad as that. Bowen’s prose is competent if not terribly interesting and the book isn’t bad per se, it’s just that it isn’t very good, and I have a whole list of very good books ahead of me. So many of them, in fact, that it really accentuates my lack of interest in this one.

And life’s too short to spend it reading books you don’t like.

If you are interested in unsympathetic characters that talk in vague circles about uninteresting things and where nothing much happens, this book is very much for you. As for me, I’m moving on to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad which I’ve already started, and which I’m very excited to continue.