Reviews for A home at the end of the world

The average rating for A home at the end of the world based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-06 00:00:00 Teresa Fajardo "Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you'll never make a life that uses you." There's something about the most inspiring and meaningful novels that make them extremely difficult to review. I chalk this up to the fact that they don't necessarily urge me to tell you what they are about. Rather, they insist that I express how they made me feel. This is a further challenge in that emotions are complex and nearly impossible to convey precisely. Michael Cunningham makes it all look so easy though. It's as if he reads your mind, extracts the most secret and tangled thoughts, and infuses his characters with the same inner turmoil and desires. You can now look at each character and find some piece of them that is astonishingly like you. It's all revealed right there on the page, lit up by the exquisite prose and the compelling dialogue. "Years have passed - we are living in the future, and it's turned out differently from what we'd planned." When I first had a hint of what this novel was about, I thought it sounded all so exotic and different from my own life. Well, parts of it did anyway. I figured I could relate to Alice, a woman who has a child she loves fiercely. Then the child grows and moves on. I'm in the middle of that right now, not with one but two children working towards extraordinary futures that will no longer be fully linked with my own. But then there are Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Did Cunningham write a story about a love triangle? Well, perhaps. But this triangle has odd, shifting angles. Their relationships with one another as well as their living arrangements may be unconventional, but their humanness is not. Our hopes and expectations change; our disappointments are always there eating away at us. Something always seems out of reach, even when we think we've built for ourselves the life that seems 'perfect' just for us. "Hope takes on a fragility. Think too hard and it's gone. I was surprised by the inner emptiness I felt, my heart and belly swinging on cords. I'd always been so present in the passing moments. I'd assumed that was enough - to taste the coffee and the wine, to feel the sex along every nerve, to see all the movies. I'd thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing that happened." Each character is plagued by the age-old question of what more is out there for him or her. What do those that came before us (both the living and the dead) expect from us? What do we owe them? How can we escape the fates of others and shape a better life for ourselves? What does our home look like, and where can we find it? I don't know if there is an answer. Except perhaps to live fully in the present, but always be prepared to reshape our future. Life is fluid, not stagnant. We can try to make of it the best that we can by keeping ourselves open to all of the bright possibilities. "This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand."

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-01 00:00:00 Michel Aressy Perhaps one reason Shakespeare is so untouchably brilliant is that you have no idea who he is from his work. This is rarely true of novelists. Read a Fitzgerald or Hemmingway novel and there's the author himself on almost every page. No one doubts Dr Zhivago is Pasternak himself. And I could carry on with innumerable other examples. True some novelists are more elusive in their work and demand more detective work, like Henry James or Nabokov or Virginia Woolf. But when you read a number of novels by the same author you begin to recognise the same pivot and cast of characters popping up over and over again. Even Shakespeare's characters reappear in his plays. One of the fascinating things about reading several books by the same author is this growing familiarity with the limited scope of his/her world. Which is why there's often a sense that every author is telling variations on the same story over and over again. The conclusion perhaps is that in life only a handful of individuals have an impact on the formation of character and the way we see the world. Virginia Woolf's point of departure in The Waves. I've now read two Cunningham novels and started a third and have begun to feel that not only do I know what to expect from his created worlds but also that I know a lot about him, the person behind the text. In much the same way we have all built notions about the real life identity of our fellow reviewers on this site. Notions which, of course, might be miles off the mark. It's always a slightly unreal feeling to feel we know someone we've never met. To the novel itself. I would have edited out the first chapter of The Hours. Here I would have edited out the last chapter. The penultimate chapter is a miles better ending. That said, this novel left me wanting to know what happens to the characters after the curtain comes down. Is that though a good sign? On the one hand it's a testament to how well he had me invested in them. On the other I felt he curtailed the story just as it was becoming even more compelling. As if Ferrante had ended Elena and Lina's story with My Brilliant Friend, a decent novel but hardly a masterpiece without its other three parts. A Home at the End of the World is about an unconventional living arrangement. Two men, one gay, the other so pliant he'll try anything and an older woman. There are lulls but loads of great stuff about parenting and romantic expectation and social conditioning and on the whole it's beautifully written and thoroughly engaging.