Briefly, A Delicious Life

Product Information

the writing style was enjoyable and i really liked seeing this story from the point of view of someone who had their life cut short (so essentially a teenager) as well as someone who spent decades as a ghost and has seen many things. Aside from Blanca the ghost, there is a clear historical foundation for many, if not most, of the scenes in this book: Chopin's music pieces, Sand's writing and affairs, the family's stay in Mallorca, the antipathy they encountered there. I had it all planned out and was not prepared, not prepared at all, to come across unfamiliar, uninvited lovers. Nevertheless it’s jarring when Blanca describes herself as 'neurotic', and it’s unclear why she is not surrounded by other ghosts. I also found it interesting how intimate Blanca gets with all the characters whether it is laying in bed with them as she listens to their internal monologue for how personally she gets invested in their struggles.

She especially loves playing the mischievous poltergeist with her enemies, including a certain monk whose role in the mystery of her early death becomes clearer as the text unfolds, and as she describes using her limited powers to tip urine on him, hide octopus tentacles behind his shelf, and shout ‘Mary doesn’t like you!I can’t really attest to its accuracy but given Chopin is kind of a pill and George is completely compelling I was personally convinced.

Until the appearance of this unconventional family, Blanca spends her centuries enjoying ‘simple pleasures: making people jump, knocking things over, tripping up passersby’. Simultaneously, we watch the stories of George Sand Frederic Chopin and Blanca unfold in a poetic prose that conveys an ever present sense of intimacy. Just as there is no sense of a distinct narrative arc, there is no sense of a distinct character arc, either. Stevens (Bleaker House) movingly interweaves her love life with that of 19th-century English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in this lyrical work. But for all her vivid atmospherics, Stevens is surprisingly insouciant about some details, including why Blanca is the only ghost around.Briefly, A Delicious Life is a lush exploration of falling in love, of the tides and depths of devotion, romance, sensuality. But then a sacristan was hired to take care of the Charterhouse in the absence of the monks, and as he swaggered around the place swinging his keys, as he napped in the monks’ deserted cots, snoring and smacking his lips in his sleep, as he sold off all the silverware, and then all the gold, as his hands grabbed more and more things that were not his to grab, it became apparent I would have to stay on a little longer to keep an eye on him.

She’s a charming, witty character whose vulnerability and occasional gloom make her an irresistible narrator. the book focuses on gender roles quite a lot, which was really interesting to read about, as the book is set in 1800’s Paris and Mallorca. Sand’s the key figure here, Chopin more backdrop, and her life history’s fascinating enough that I wondered why Stevens didn’t simply focus on a retelling of that, rather than this more elaborate take. There was a small fissure in the plaster above the main doorway where, in 1712, Brother Federico had drunkenly hurled a plate.Nell Stevens’s debut novel combines fictionalised biography with an unusual variation on a ghost story. Since Blanca is both hundreds of years old and fourteen, Stevens’ prose bursts with the beginnings of erotic excitement. Sand and Chopin – between them “Godless foreign odd consumptive cross-dressers … strangers and strange and strangely insouciant about their strangeness” – are instantly unpopular with the locals. In any case, this book is intriguing, but it had the problem you always get around the fictionalisation of real-life events—which is that life rarely offer satisfying conclusions. Initially puzzled by Sand's affection for the cranky composer, she comes to understand that 'Chopin's music was the best of him.

Her writing is published in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In this regard, I would say disregard the blurb about 'Briefly, a Delicious Life': phrases like 'emotionally moving' and 'surprisingly touching' fall far short of the mark for Stevens's fiction debut and, in my opinion, 'romantic fixation' is the very last thing I'd identify as its subject matter.Unfortunately, the premise of a ghost falling in love with a woman was the only thing that was interesting in this book. I cannot wait to read more from Stevens and I’m overjoyed I was able to read this as an advanced reader copy. Blanca's afterlife as a spirit able to inhabit people's minds to 'live' through their senses, also allows us to view their memories and, thus, read their histories through glimpses of their memory. It took enormous effort for me to make such impact on the world, to move an object from place to place—I am weak, my ability to exert pressure is erratic—but the girl never seemed to wonder what happened to the bucket, how it was that it came back clean every morning; she simply gripped the sides in her shaky, thin fingers and replenished it. I began to think of moving on, started to fantasize about taking some rooms in the center of Palma, nothing too elaborate, just a vantage point from which I could watch the city happen.