After experimenting with literary forms over the next two decades (the novel Mitz was a mock biography of Virginia Woolf’s pet marmoset she also wrote a memoir of her 1970s friendship with Susan Sontag ’93HON), Nunez returned to the unnamed narrator in The Friend, a touching examination of grief that won the 2018 National Book Award. She first earned acclaim with her 1995 debut, the autobiographical novel A Feather on the Breath of God, narrated by an unnamed mixed-race immigrant girl growing up in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1950s and ’60s. But readers should not be fooled by the straightforward tone Nunez’s seventh novel is stunningly complex, a nuanced, layered look at aging, friendship, love, and death.įans of Nunez will find both the themes and the voice familiar. Like much of her prose, the line is simple and direct. “I went to hear a man give a talk,” writes Sigrid Nunez ’72BC, ’75SOA in the opening sentence of her new novel, What Are You Going Through.
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