Briefly, A Delicious Life

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Blanca finds herself intrigued by George breaking convention, drawn to the woman, and curious to learn more. 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. ⁣ I found myself floored by Nell Stevens' mastery with language, by her deep understanding of the human spirit, by the astonishing freshness of this historical novel. Briefly, A Delicious Life is a shining work of art and Nell Stevens is an original, whose touch is as deft as it is masterful." The reason why I don't rate this higher is because I am not certain of what the central exploration is of the story. I am unsure if it is love, if it is perspective, if it is the significance of time. All these things are heavily present in the fabric of the narrative and yet I'm not sure which one I was supposed to pay the most attention to since all of them are delicately touched upon yet not intricately enough pursued. 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. My rating would be higher if such a theme would be more apparent to me simply because on the other hand I don't have an upbeat tempo to keep me interested in reading for longer periods of time. winning writer: a playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sands

between George, Chopin, and Blanca&#8212agorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and lifeGeorge Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited,

Blanca draws readers along on a tour of own past and George’s. Like any benevolent ghost, she’s a fan of pranks, but also hopes that she might use her power of omniscience to reverse tragic trajectories. A lover of men in her lifetime, she’s now enamoured with women in the hereafter, and outraged at how, even centuries later, women’s rights and desire are still being ignored. This is an earthy, impish, sexy read. Though it starts to wear a little thin before the end, it’s still well worth the ride. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. nell stevens is an amazing writer. I could have highlighted every paragraph in this book because they were so lyrically told. it adds to listen to the mentioned Chopin compositions that make up some chapters of the book, because the music adds so much to the writing that I couldn’t even understand fully until I listed and read (swipe for the playlist) The characterization fell flat. We are told things & not shown. I feel harsh saying this but I found myself caring more about George Sand & Chopin's relationship while reading an online article than when I read more than half of this book.A bird startled in the tree above them and flew off, dislodging a little flurry of feathers and leaves, and both men looked up as though expecting bad news. I did feel, perhaps, the book didn’t entirely know how to end itself or what to do with Blanca once she’d told her story (it’s certainly not a text interested in what it means that it has a ghost in it, which—honestly—is fair enough). Or perhaps it was just that the emotional intensity had reached such pitch, with Chopin finally able to piano and yet also about to die maybe and angry Catholics descending on the monastery, that a vague sense of anti-climax was inevitable. After all, as I pointed out in the opening of this review, that’s kind of the problem with life as a whole. There was a long silence and then the young man said, somewhat pointedly, “We were carrying things, Mama.”

This is Stevens’s third book but her first novel; her previous books ( Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me) were autofiction-ish but have tended to be classified as memoirs. That same playfulness with genre is here, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical novel about George Sand – in the vein of the underwhelming The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg – into something cheeky and magical. We’re really going to stay here?” Maurice, hovering in the doorway from the garden, looked uncertain.I will also say that the whole "sapphic love story" aspect of this is barely in the novel, so I wouldn't get your hopes up about that.) (Oh, and the ending was so clumsy and anticlimactic; it felt like it undermined what was already a very shaky story to begin with.) I don't hesitate to mark 'Briefly, a Delicious Life' as a five-star read. It will be something I'll reread, and have as a fixture in the STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS section of the library. Blanca has been dead for a few centuries when she falls in love – instantly and devotedly – with celebrated novelist George Sand. George is unlike anyone Blanca has encountered in hundreds of years of haunting: a woman dressed in men’s clothes, a ferocious writer, a passionate lover of men and women alike and an ambivalent mother.

Briefly, A Delicious Life is the story of Blanca, a ghost who died young and stays close to a small village in Mallorca where she lived. ⁣Blanca has seen people come and go, live and die, but never has she has such a fascination as she does with George, a woman who dresses like a man and recently arrived at the former monastery with her boyfriend, Chopin, and her two children, Solange and Maurice. ⁣ Can I absolutely discount this novel as Bad? No, but that's precisely the problem. It's not that there's nothing redeemable about Briefly, A Delicious Life, but rather that it never does anything with its redeemable parts. It has so much potential, and yet it simply does not deliver on that potential--a fact which, for me, made it all the more disappointing in the end.Briefly, a Delicious Life was a book that I didn’t mind reading, but I didn’t really love it. Perhaps this was something I should have foreseen from the start. It never really sounded exactly my kind of book, but I was tempted by the idea of a ghost in love with a woman. And it wasn’t a bad book, for sure. It just wasn’t my kind of book. Speaking of plots, if you like stories where there isn’t that clear a narrative direction, where it really is just about characters living, then this would be one for you. It is 1838, and George has come to the island of Mallorca with her ailing lover, Frédéric Chopin. As the weather and the locals turn against this strange couple, can the love of a teenage ghost keep them from disaster? Since Blanca is both hundreds of years old and fourteen, Stevens’ prose bursts with the beginnings of erotic excitement. ‘I start to see things differently,’ Blanca says of her adolescent awakening, ‘Courgettes.’ She and her mother find the monks in the charterhouse sexy (‘so much muscle and heft and fat and their lovely broad shoulders under their habits’), but this enthusiasm infuses everything. Blanca’s ability to sink into characters’ bodies - taste what they taste, feel what they feel, hear what they hear - means that a novel by a dead, disembodied character is surprisingly sensory, fat on life: it is about first kisses but also the scents of oranges and rotting pomegranates, ‘the sweetness of a stray sugar crystal’ from an apple tart dissolving on a tongue. A moment when Blanca hears Chopin’s piano-playing exemplifies Stevens’ sensual, synesthetic writing: You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.