Sight

June 15, 2018
This debut novel considers the intrinsic intimacy and distance between mother and daughter, from the perspective of a narrator who is both, as well as the struggle to clearly see one another and oneself.A woman, pregnant with her second child, gazes out a window at her firstborn, a little girl, playing in the garden, and contemplates the deep sense of loss that accompanies her daughter's growth. "The weight of her body when I lift her takes me by surprise, its unfamiliarity a reiteration of the distance between us," Greengrass' narrator muses. "She used to clamber over me, her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck, as though I were furniture or an extension of herself, unthought-of or intimately known. Now she stands apart and I must reach for her, on each occasion a little further until it seems her progress towards adulthood is a kind of disappearing and that I know her less and less the more she becomes herself." Juxtaposed against the woman's meditation on motherhood is her loss of her own mother, some years before, when the narrator was 21 and "at that turning spot between adolescence and adulthood," a death she continues to mourn and mull as the "defining event in [her] life," fracturing it in two. She reflects, too, on her maternal grandmother, a psychoanalyst with whom she spent her childhood summers, absorbing her disciplined pursuit of self-knowledge. Interspersed between the narrator's personal reflections are the stories of scientists who quite literally exposed mysteries that lay within human beings: the man who discovered the X-ray; the surgical team whose work, in the mid-18th century, shed new light on the anatomy of the pregnant female body; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and his daughter, Anna. Unflinchingly focused on life and death, love and loss, this book is not light reading. And while it has been labeled a novel, it is less a story--with a single dramatic arc and resolution--than it is a densely packed collection of clearly articulated insights on the struggle to bridge the gaps between ourselves and those to whom we yearn to be close, our efforts to define and take full measure of ourselves. It is novel as excavation.Greengrass digs deep below the surface to explore the human condition and presents the reader with unearthed truths to ponder and pocket.

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June 25, 2018
Greengrass’s debut novel (after the story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It) follows an unnamed narrator as she wrestles with new motherhood, weaving her memories into a thoughtful portrait of what it is to be both a parent and a child. The novel is divided into three acts, each corresponding to a broad period in the narrator’s life: her mother’s death and her own grieving; childhood summers spent with her intimidating, psychoanalyst grandmother (known only as Dr. K); and her pregnancy before the birth of her first child. Each of these sequences is in turn partnered with accounts from the development of modern medicine: in the first section, it’s Wilhelm Röntgen and the discovery of X-rays; the second is Sigmund and Anna Freud’s development of psychoanalysis; the third is John and William Hunter pioneering the field of anatomy. Unifying the narrator and the scientists is the singular desire to look inward (literally or figuratively) and seek “the resolution of a complicated pattern into one that could be understood.” Greengrass writes with precision and honesty, providing an unconventional but nuanced, meditative experience.

August 1, 2018
An unnamed first-person narrator is pregnant with her second child in the present day of Greengrass' first novel. Most of her story, however, takes place elsewhere: in recollections of her mother's illness and death, which happened at the start of her adulthood and deepened this line in her development to a sort of abyss; in memories of summer months spent with her grandmother, a psychotherapist known to her as Doctor K; and in interspliced historical narratives of medical history (eighteenth-century estimations of the surgeries that would, one day, actually save lives), technological inventions (X-rays and moving pictures), and the birth of modern psychotherapy. Reaching its limbs into these far-flung corners, and, like pregnancy, divided into thirds, Greengrass' novel thus presents life-making in its love-fueled fascinations, biological marvels, and psychic terrors. As the narrator considers her childhood and parenthood, she wonders about how what we see, the surface of things, including ourselves, could be everything and nothing. With visceral, elegantly wrought truths of life and loss, this is an exciting companion to Sheila Heti's recent Motherhood (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2018

Grieving her mother's death and wrestling with indecision over whether to have a child, an unnamed narrator explores her own past while she researches discoveries about the unseen world. Her investigations begin with the Lumi�re brothers, whose 1895 42-second film captured the public imagination with the first moving images on screen. The narrator moves on to Wilhelm R�ntgen, a science rock star, credited with the discovery of X-rays. Summer visits to her psychoanalyst grandmother may have sparked her interest in Sigmund Freud and his breakthrough study of the unconscious mind. While her patient husband awaits her childbirth decision, she devotes hours to reading in libraries. Her research continues with the scientists who developed dissection techniques for female anatomy and telescopes for understanding the universe. VERDICT This assured first novel is a story about different kinds of sight and insight--what is seen with the eyes, understood with the brain, and the previously unseen made visible. A pleasurable mashup of history, science, and women's fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 2/19/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2018

Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award for her debut collection, British author Greengrass arrives here with a debut novel whose unnamed narrator chronicles her movement toward motherhood.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.