Briefly, A Delicious Life

Product Information

this was such an enjoyable read? it was sorta weird and i don't know how comfortable i would be in recommending it to people, considering i don't think it's for everyone. i mean i know that's usually a thing you say about every book lol but i feel like it needs to be pointed out.

O'Keefe, Alice (27 May 2017). "Bleaker House by Nell Stevens review – how not to write a novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2023. funny, righteous ghost, she&#8217sbeen hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying onThis reading group guide for BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. 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 novel of tremulous beauty, sly wit and deep understanding, Briefly, A Delicious Life is an addictive, sunlit delight."

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. I went into this book almost completely blind and I’m so glad I did! it’s a beautifully romantic historical fiction, filled with music, love, and humility. the book focuses on gender roles quite a lot, which was really interesting to read about, as the book is set in 1800’s Paris and Mallorca. George, one of our central characters, rejects marriage and typical women’s fashion, adopting trousers and suits for most of the book. What took you all so long?” The lovers, drawn by the commotion, were standing at the window, the woman leaning into the room with her forearms draped on the sill. Her voice: clear, low. Stevens tempers this excitement with tragedy, and Briefly, A Delicious Life is also about the ways a body can betray a person, especially a woman. Fundamentally, though, it is that rare thing: a literary novel concerned with pleasure — of sex, and eating, and music, and the pleasures of a narrative, of escaping somewhere else, becoming someone else. Although a local jokes about Sand and Chopin coming to Mallorca for the weather when it is mostly miserable during their stay, the novel itself is sun-kissed, steeped in the senses, and in many ways a perfect summer beach read.This electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever book is Nell Stevens' best to date, and categorically the most gorgeous first novel I've read in years. It's rare that I come across historical fiction so sensual, so original, so intelligent, and so brimming with love." Nell Stevens’s hugely accomplished debut novel evokes a sense both of place and time with a confidence that augurs well for her future career. She mixes historical fact with the fantastical in her account of Chopin and George Sand arriving at a Mallorca monastery in 1838, only to be met by Blanca, the centuries-old ghost of a teenage girl who died cruelly young, who makes Sand confront truths about gender and sexuality that she might have preferred to ignore. The book is attuned to both contemporary and timeless concerns and grips throughout. This Much Is True Rediscovering sexual desire is a big theme throughout the novel. In what ways do George’s and Blanca’s first sexual encounters differ from their experiences of queer sexual desire later in life? Consider the difference between the way Blanca describes her actual sexual experiences with Ham and her sexual fantasies with George. What do you make of the difference in intensity of these experiences? Stevens, Nell (24 October 2018). "Communing with Mrs. Gaskell". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 9 January 2023.

Read George Sand’s memoir A Winter in Majorca, which recounts the details of her trip with Chopin and her two children. How does she describe Mallorca? What do you make of Stevens’s adaptation of Sand’s experiences?

get [PDF] Download Briefly, A Delicious Life: A Novel

Blanca's afterlife as a spirit able to inhabit people's minds to 'live' through their senses, also allows us to view their memories and, thus, read their histories through glimpses of their memory. As a plot device, this didn't make me uncomfortable. I can see how it might be jarring for some readers, such a convenient authorial contrivance as it is. But I find that I could reconcile that cost with the wealth that it reaps in terms of opportunities to explore physicality and sensuality. Basically, Blanca could take me anywhere she likes, as long as she keeps describing what she sees, feels, smells, tastes, and hears: 'I felt a wrench in the silence that followed. There was something about Chopin's music that lodged itself between your teeth - where teeth had been - or slipped through your ribs - where ribs had been - and became a new part of your body - where body had been. There was something about it that gave you a body to borrow, and let you live in it, briefly, extraordinarily.'In this regard, I would say disregard the blurb about 'Briefly, a Delicious Life': phrases like 'emotionally moving' and 'surprisingly touching' fall far short of the mark for Stevens's fiction debut and, in my opinion, 'romantic fixation' is the very last thing I'd identify as its subject matter. The core of this piece of writing is the impact upon the mind of the physical senses, as all of the quotes above demonstrate. Stevens achieves this in a manner that's vivacious, hefty, absolute, not - as the blurb would have it - merely 'charming' and 'original'. Though Blanca is attracted to George partly because of the way she dresses, she is still appalled when George goes into the village in a suit. How do the villagers react to the way George presents herself, as opposed to her friends in Paris? 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.

Look again at the chapters titled after Chopin’s compositions: “Prelude No. 11 in B Major, Vivace,” “Prelude No. 4 in E Minor, Largo,” “Prelude No. 9 in E Major, Largo,” etc. Find and play these pieces while you discuss the novel. This novel follows a cast of historical characters as seen through the eyes of Blanca, a ghost who is haunting the Valldemossa town in the Mallorcan countryside. Simultaneously, we watch the stories of George Sand Frederic Chopin and Blanca unfold in a poetic prose that conveys an ever present sense of intimacy. This is a book more about sensations and feelings rather than a central conflict therefore it might be not for everyone's taste, but in my opinion this is a beautiful piece of literature nonetheless. Ever since I finished this novel, I've been trying to put my finger on why it felt so utterly underwhelming to me. Briefly, A Delicious Life is a novel that should, by all accounts, be good; it has so much potential. A centuries-year-old ghost of a girl, a musician, a writer, two children, Mallorca, and a sapphic love story--everything about that appealed to me. And yet none of it comes together to form a story that is in any way rewarding or gratifying to read.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. This book is the definition of a five-star read to the point where I debated not writing a review beyond that because nothing I say would be as good. But I have Thoughts.