Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met a hitchhike through France that he had tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life. Picking her way through bundles of letters and postcards from five decades earlier, Katrin begins to uncover a life she knew nothing of, and an expedition that exceeded anything her professional, biographical subjects ever undertook. Think of me then, her husband beseeched her, at the roadside, thumb in the air, gaily setting forth, never forget me then. David Constantines passionate tale of grief and rediscovery marks only the second foray into novel writing for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim. A great work of literature, he reminds us, is never finished, it is a living and moving thing, alive in all its parts in every fibre, designed to be inexhaustible and to outlive. As Katrins journey proves, the lives of those we love are similarly inexhaustible, they keep on offering up new revelations, possessing the people they leave behind, and forever needing to be re-written.
Arvustused
'The Life-Writer evokes both the rapture and heartache of first love and the windswept loneliness of bereft old age. In its emotional honesty, Mr. Constantine also confronts the ambiguities of his own art: The more beguiling the storytellers vision, the more harm it can wreak on the experience of reality.' - The Wall Street Journal; '...the beauty of Constantines writing lies in his extraordinary patience and precision with every whorl of consciousness, his unabashed fascination with every leaf and branch of the inner life. His emotional intelligence is as abundant as his linguistic gifts, and as necessary to the story hes telling...' - The New York Times; 'Here, (Constantine) has a persistent interest in the discarded pieces of other peoples lives that can reawaken ones own past, or open up the incommunicable in the present.' - Financial Times; 'Constantines preoccupation with the superior vitality of the past, and past youth in particular, draws out the best in his ardent and profoundly melancholy sensibility.' - The Guardian
Born in Salford, David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe (including Collected Poems (2004), Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014) and Belongings (2020)), as well as two novels (most recently The Life-Writer with Comma) and five collections of short fiction: Back at the Spike (1994), the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), The Shieling (Comma, 2009), Tea at the Midland (Comma, 2012), which won the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award in 2013, and The Dressing-Up Box (Comma, 2019), as well as In Another County: Selected Stories (Comma 2015). Davids story Tea at the Midland won the 2010 National Short Story Award, and his story In Another Country was adapted into 45 Years an Oscar-nominated film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. With his wife Helen, David edited Modern Poetry in Translation for many years. He is also translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. He is the winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry 2020. He lives in Oxford.
