review; star gazing

Star Gazing
by Linda Gillard

Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne’s passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter’s night. Keir makes no concession to her condition. He is abrupt to the point of rudeness, yet oddly kind. But can Marianne trust her feelings for this reclusive stranger who wants to take a blind woman to his island home on Skye, to “show” her the stars?

Review:
A cousin, one who has only recently gotten into the joys of reading, recommended this novel to me. She lent me her copy as well. It took me awhile to get into it, I will admit. I think the writing style got to me, but once I sat down and started reading it in ernest, I practically devoured the novel.

A blind protagonist is not something you come across very often in novels. And how does one describe things when your protagonist is blind? How do you have the protagonist describe things if she can’t see colour or objects or even the people in her life? It’s fascinating that despite her disability, it is very easy to connect with Marianne.

She is a complex character – in her 40s, blind and widowed, she is cynical and closed off, and she makes decisions that had me, as a reader, wanting to shake her and tell her off. Her motivations and characteristics are real, and I cannot know if being born blind does have people understanding the world in the way Marianne does, but Gillard writes her realistically.

I really enjoyed, after I got over it, the fact that there are portions of the books where we are given insights into not just Marianne’s thoughts, but the male protagonist Keir’s, as well as Marianne’s sister Laura as well. These portions were written in the first person narrative, and each rang differently, truly a testament to Gillard’s ability to write. And the third person narrative that threads all these points of views together is written in the present tense. This mix, while it sounds eclectic, and truthfully, I did find it weird at first, actually works for this story. The style and characters evoked reactions from me I did not expect.

I hurt when Marianne hurt, I fell in love with Keir as they connected,  and I laughed and enjoyed Laura’s side story with her novels and her friends and her obvious care and concern for her sister.

It took me a few days to read this novel. I started it a while back, but only managed to cover a couple of chapters until I had gone out for coffee. And then I couldn’t put the book down and finished it that day itself. It’s intense and sweet and a little bit angst-y at times, but a moving read.