Briefly, A Delicious Life

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Around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a complex triangulation amongst Brothers Augustin, Miguel, and Simón. It was something he had begun working on in previous days: a dappled sunlight opening, a break in the clouds, a tentative ray touching the horizon.

That being said, I thought it was interesting how this is a book that recenters a heavily male dominant event in history (Chopin's creation of the Raindrop Prelud) focuses on George Sand and her emotions as she watches her lover fade away and her family fall apart. So you keep reading, hoping that we're going somewhere, except the catch is we're not really going anywhere.the characters were interesting but not in a sense of them being memorable characters you will think about for years to come, more in a combined-with-a-smart-narrative-structure sorta way. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.

They clambered over the low wall at the end of the garden and sat on it with their backs to me, looking out at the tiered fields of almond trees descending the mountain. He wasted no time in pursuing that pleasure, leaving little presents for the teenage girl to find under the cloisters’ arches, then murmuring sweet things in her ear, then brushing his fingers against her cheek, his lips against hers, and so on. A young woman, very red-faced and sweaty from the climb, attempted to control a girl of around ten years old, who was spinning on the worn-down steps so that her skirts blew out. Nell Stevens brings a reader into the strange and brilliant artistic exile of George Sand, writing this tender story with tremendous heart and daring.It is a terrible, agonizing, unbearable experience and she goes back to the theater night after night to feel it again. There was a smell of fermentation rising from the ground, and it gave the scene—the lovers, the kiss—a fizzy, too-hot quality.

Once I’d found my way inside a person’s head,” she explains, “their pasts were right there, under the slop and tide of feelings on the surface, and I could see it all for myself, as though I was translating a language I didn’t know I knew.Everyone is so amazingly complex and nuanced because no one, especially not Blanca, is a reliable narrator. She describes with gusto the acute discomforts induced by damp, drippy walls, foul weather, inadequate food, and blood-soaked handkerchiefs. Briefly, A Delicious Life is a lush exploration of falling in love, of the tides and depths of devotion, romance, sensuality. While she tries to figure George out, Blanca reflects on her own memories of life before she died and how her young death came to be. According to Sarah Churchwell’s bracing new book, it is time to remove the narrative from its undeserved pedestal and examine its problematic treatment of feminism, class and, above all, race afresh.