Life, End Of

Ali Smith - Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End Of (2006)

Hard to know which Brooke-Rose to choose, but of them all I think this one, her last, might just edge it. The word original isn't original enough for what Brooke-Rose did with the form. She's a writer's writer's writer's writer, and her novels are unlike anyone's writing in English before her. She frees up the sentence, by attention to and by playfulness with its grammatical component parts, to such an extent that language becomes nervous system and the book as physical an entity as you, me, or her – in this case at the end of a life, when the body refuses all sorts of things and faces all sorts of discomforts, and the book does too, with spirit, truthfulness and expansivity of thought.

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