Reviews for Passages

The average rating for Passages based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-30 00:00:00 Yolanda James Not that I've dismissed the possibility that my brother is dead. We have discussed what is possible, what is not. They say there's every chance. No chance at all. I had the feeling of staying up late at night and listening to someone far away fighting. Voices muffled, then sex. Not lovemaking. I can't see or here anything and then images come from the sounds. Not too loud, someone will hear. An unreal quality, like playacting or a dream. Whips, moans, hair and lashing. The next day they emerge with red eyes unused to the sun. I will look away and hear sounds of insects. Eating, flying, going about their business. Too large and I'm too small, cornered. Pollinating something, a dream feeling. The unreal too large quality when you stare at something to avoid seeing something else. I wasn't sure what was going on. It could have been a sitcom with a "it was all a dream" ending. She is looking for her brother. She doesn't know that he is dead. He goes with her. Sometimes she is talking. When she is talking it feels like what people say is prose poetry even though there is no such thing. You could take any of her words and separate them to live on their own. On their own they would be poetry. Maybe about something that someone saw and repeated under glass. It's blown up. Together the words flow over and I get nothing. When he talks it is like he is talking twice. If he were written he'd be a book with margins written on sides. I'm not sure how many sides he has. There are references to snakes and mythological beings. History, although he doesn't own his own. He drifts between lovers. Sometimes he's a married man carrying on an affair. He doesn't want them, he drifts, they follow. I had the feeling this is to have something underlining that he is following her to look for her brother. She has all of the mystery to him. Anyone could be her brother. Everyone she meets is her brother. I had absolutely no idea who her brother was, or why she wanted to find him. I never got over the feeling of listening to someone that I couldn't see. I do like how Quinn describes things. He acknowledged her in the hotel by smiling a half smile. He did not seem to belong, belong in his clothes. Were they too large, too small? Something was wrong somewhere. Perhaps the tie with that shirt. She sat in the lounge. He sat at the bar. She saw him in the mirror. She looked at a magazine. Cigarettes lit one from another. His fingers round the stem of glass again. I felt sure something would happen. I ordered a drink. He lit my cigarette. Don't you think this place is after all charming? He said, fingers across the lighter, again and again. She found herself breathless, could not, would not answer. But she smiled, less than half a smile. He was after all a stranger, a foreigner. Someone she would prefer not to know. Besides... I could dress them in clothes, this man and this woman. All leather, skinned from still alive animals. They scream behind barn doors. They would be an image before a door closed. Like in a film about mental patients to show that it is a place you don't want to be inside. A woman is screaming far off. Something terrible would be happening to her. Another woman would scream to suggest that there was as much to fear from her as from any of the men in authoritarian white coats. "Fucking! Fucking bitch!" She would scream. I felt like that all of the time when reading Passages. The door would always close. Something else would be in its place. Wake up, another dream, another door or is it a window. I don't know if they find the brother or what they would do if they do find him. Move on, nothing to see here. Nothing to do, nothing to live. On page 42 of the Dalkey Archive edition there's a part captioned "Notebook of a Depressive" with a list of symptoms. I felt that way about them. Maybe the door didn't close and I'm just looking over a chart on the clipboard held by the guy with the coat on. Maybe they all felt like they were listening in on someone else. It's not a good feeling to do that too long. To space out until everything looks too big. I used to do that a lot and would regret it afterwards because my eyes would hurt. What would it feel like if you weren't doing it on purpose and you couldn't stop? With Quin it felt on purpose and only interested like in really big bugs. To feel that way and not be able to help it was probably more the point. You would walk around in your own hall of mirrors and then is the joke on you? I could almost feel his helplessness, his awful rape fantasies and hitching his dying star to her burned out flame. Close another door.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-19 00:00:00 John Batgos A Mediterranean travelelogue of disaffection and dissolution, Passages follows a women searching for her brother, dead or alive, across unnamed and war-torn countries, while her sometime lover alternately aids her search and follows his own into erotic excess. This is a very oblique story, conveyed in fragments and journal-bound notes, where themes and details flutter by and lost into a desolate landscape more than they compose a linear narrative. It may be Ann Quin's best writing, though, suprising me with its poetic clarity after the messiness of her first novel, and heavily-collaged last (there, though, the messiness seems entirely deliberate and thematically apt, however, as the unstoppable rush of modern media constantly interrupts and disrupts the prose). In any event, this catches Quin at her at her most exacting, perhaps recomposing the muddled search of her sometime collaborator Alan Burns' sludgily disconcerting Europe After the Rain, in a series of hallucinatory postcards. Like that one, this is a book that must simply be surrendered to and carried away by.