A Book a Day: Susie Boyt: Loved and Lost

Original title: Loved and missed
Translation: Magdalena Palmer
Year of publication: 2021
Valuation: Recommended (or something else)

The thin red line It’s not just Terrence Malick’s movie. In literature it would be the border that separates the tear-jerking and maudlin melodrama from the drama, the wire from which you and your entire team will fall off if you take a wrong step. I say this because Susie Boyt She borders on danger on several occasions, it seems that she is about to lose her footing but, like a good tightrope walker, she regains her balance, avoids the fall and brings the novel to a successful conclusion.

And the ingredients, right from the start, seem like a bit of an “Antena 3 TV movie on Sunday afternoons”: three women (grandmother, mother and daughter / Ruth, Eleanor and Lily), drugs and abandonment. Luckily, this does not fall into the hands of a crappy screenwriter and falls into the hands of Susie Boyt, who gets the general tone of the novel right and the construction of characters and relationships between them, reaching truly notable moments. Thus, shame, regret, compassion, pain, guilt, sisterhood, longings for intimacy and familiarity run through a novel with three well-differentiated plot parts.

The first of them, and the most notable in my opinion, is more focused on the mother-child relationship: what to do, how to face a situation like the one Ruth has to face, how to live with a daily life in which infinite sadness is mixed with little rays of hope, etc. The approach that Boyt gives to the subject and the character of Ruth, both treated with great sensitivity by the author, make the first 150 pages highly recommended.

The problem, for me, is that there is a moment in the novel when Eleanor practically leaves the focus and the action focuses on Ruth and Lily, acquiring a touch of maudlin that makes it almost go off the rails. The previous investigation into the Ruth/Eleanor relationship takes a backseat and leaves us with the feeling of a wasted path.

Fortunately, a new twist in the final pages, a final twist that once again puts mother-child relationships in the foreground (albeit from a different point of view) makes the novel rise and one ends, despite its crudeness, on a good note. taste in mouth

So in summary, a very British novel in tone and atmosphere, extremely tough, with good characters, narrated with sensitivity, without sentimentality (at least for the most part) and without falling into absurd reductionisms. A good book, yes.