RaveThe Brooklyn RailNunez shares the heartbreaking faults of human communication. She demonstrates language’s shortcomings and the way it allows us to share experiences yet fails to connect us deeply enough to understand another living thing completely. At the same time, she illustrates the beautiful ways that we make do, and spend lifetimes in bittersweet pursuits of personal connections that might heal our emotional and existential wounds ... Nunez has reframed both the horror of addressing one’s own mortality and the process of despairing the loss of a loved one. There are two achievements that have allowed Nunez to accomplish this feat. One is by establishing a narrator superbly unique and round. The narrator’s observations, tangents, and her highly associative memory that leads to poetic distractions, create a high-water mark of realism ... The other aspect of the book that provides the foundation for the reader’s immersion is Nunez’s language. The novel is full of stunning prose ... The book seems to state that how we suffer, how we cope with despair and mortality, is how we communicate who we are in essence.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
