User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Update: Friends, as I had hoped, this novel did win the National Book Award for 2018. (See comments below where Wyndy first brought it to my attention that it was nominated.) This is such a well-deserved honour for this author and this novel - I hope the Award inspires all those who may have hesitated to read this. Of the last four books I have read, three have been about loss and grief. It is another of those serendipities that I value as a reader and by itself gives cause for reflection.
This book does the same. Many times I paused to ponder the words, phrases, and sentences I was reading.
There are no names in this story save for one. Apollo is a harlequin Great Dane dog who comes to the woman when her friend and mentor of many years dies, and Wife Three cannot cope with the deep mourning of this left-behind pet.
This novel presented a puzzle to me as well as a beautiful, well-told story. Is she writing a letter to her friend and mentor who died? Is she writing a book? A biography of her friend, the writer, perhaps? Are these thoughts and ideas ones that come to her and she records them in her journal? It could be any one of those – or all of them. I never found out for certain, and ultimately, it does not matter.
The woman is mourning. That is for certain. The dog is in mourning – that is certain, too. Between the two of them, with the threat of eviction hanging over their heads (the woman’s apartment does not allow dogs), they immerse themselves in each other’s grief and seek healing. First for themselves, and then for each other. Or, maybe for each other with the by-product a healing for themselves.
The passages on writing are extraordinary, contradictory at times, and remind us exactly how subjective certain aspects of life and death are. I personally do not know of a family that has not been touched by suicide at one time or another. Through this woman’s literary quotes and musings of her own, I came to understand suicide at levels I had not even thought of before.
There are passages on the relationship between Apollo and the woman, and their many ups and downs in the process of building a relationship that would serve them both. The woman is reminded many times during this novel of small stories about people she knew, not just her friend and mentor, but others who sparked more recollections that connected with her present moments.
There are also many passages on writers and writing; on readers and reading. Here is one small piece that had an impact on me (as did so much of the writing). I hope that even removed from context, its meaning comes through. The woman, as is the case in most of this story, is addressing her friend:
But the truth was, you had become so dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading that something had happened that you had thought never could happen: you had started not to care whether people read you or not. And though you knew your publisher would spit in your eye for saying so, you were inclined to agree with whoever it was who said that no truly good book would find more than three thousand readers. I am not sure how so much managed to be housed in the pages of this book of less than 200 pages. It is almost like opening a box that has many smaller boxes inside it. The box isn’t big, but it can hold many, many more containers within. I highly recommend finding a copy of this as soon as you can, and I hope that your explorations reveal as many gold nuggets and gemstones as it did for me.
Edited to add: This novel is on the list (voting is tomorrow, I believe) for the National Book Award for fiction! Thank you so much to our friend Wyndy who posted this link: https://lithub.com/meet-national-book...
Rating: really liked it
Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend sometimes reads like a memoir, sometimes like a letter to a friend and sometimes, in an attempt to make sense of both her friend’s death and the dog who has come to stand in for him, a philosophical inquiry. I loved it! Nunez is smart, funny and thought-provoking as she explores life, death, writing and relationships. I know this book is not for everyone. The fact that writing (and the writing life) is such a strong focus will appeal to some and turn others off. Perhaps as a consequence, it doesn’t really have a strong plot (unless you count whether the unnamed narrator will find a way to keep her friend’s dog), but, in my opinion, that’s not really the point. Nunez does so much in these pages that keeps me wanting to keep reading. This was my first time reading Sigrid Nunez, but it won’t be the last time. I will look for another of Nunez’s
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Since Sigrid Nunez's visit to Wyoming, her latest novel, The Friend, won the National Book of the Year Award! Congratulations, Sigrid!!
Rating: really liked it
despite my joy over twinkle lights and tiny notebooks &etc, i was apprehensive when i got this book in my quarterly literary fiction box from pagehabit. let’s just say this isn’t a good time of year for me to be reading books about suicide OR books where beloved animals might die. but this isn’t a tearjerker by any means - for a book about grief, it’s almost entirely cerebral, and most of the emotional responses to death are centered in the behavior of the dog whose master has just died.
it’s somewhere in-between a letter and a novel, without being shaped like either - a series of loosely connected, stream-of-consciousness musings written in second-person, where the “you” is not the reader, but the narrator’s recently deceased longtime friend and mentor, whose unexpected suicide left behind a widow, two ex-wives, a career’s worth of students and readers, the narrator herself, and a 180-pound great dane named apollo. apollo is more or less foisted upon the narrator by wife three, despite her enviably rent-stabilized manhattan apartment’s “no dogs” policy, and they build a companionship upon their shared loss.
the narrator is also a writing teacher, and this book feels like a writing assignment: write a book about the grieving process without being emotionally manipulative, without any named (human) characters, without a traditional plot or narrative structure. also, name-drop, quote, and reference at least fifty writers. per chapter. the result is unusual; grief manifesting in a clinical, detached way, frequently as physical symptoms of emotional distress. but ironically, it’s this self-consciously strict refusal to commit to or indulge any emotional response on paper that makes the pain stand out that much more; the control and the effort that control must require.
a lot of the novel is about writing in general and about writing as therapy - it’s a recurring theme in a book in which recurrence itself is a theme. there’s always more than one thing going on in any given passage, something harkening back to, or presaging, another passage - it’s all very intricate while giving the illusion it’s unconcerned with structure.
a sample page:
A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can’t possibly produce a good book.
You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg.
Turn then to Isak Denisen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. Woolf is talking about writing about her mother, thoughts of whom had obsessed her between the ages of thirteen (her age when her mother died) and forty-four, when, in a great, apparently involuntary rush, she wrote To the Lighthouse. After which the obsession ceased: I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
Q. Does the effectiveness of catharsis depend on the quality of the writing? And if a person finds catharsis by writing a book, does it matter whether or not the book is any good?
My friend is also writing about her mother.
Writers love quoting Milosz: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
After I put my mother in a novel she never forgave me.
Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’s not for another to use it for fiction.
there are some absolutely gorgeous moments in this book - some excellent lines and inspired observations and unexpected connections, but that’s what it left me with - i felt like i had experienced several small lovely
moments without having read something… complete? i’m not able to articulate it with any precision right now, but it’s something like this book pleased me on an analytic level without allowing me any more immersive pleasure but that it also it kind of felt like when i used to have seizures - there’d be a sensation of time passing punctuated by flashes of clarity but no sense or understanding of the event as a whole.
TLDR - i liked it, but i didn’t love it.
although - look how cute it is under the hood:
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REVIEW TO COME!
my new quarterly literary fiction box from pagehabit has arrived!!
oh, man - i have a LOT of catching up to do!! but what fun it will be to do so!
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
I loved the Great Dane, Apollo, but unfortunately couldn’t get into the book other than the sections that talked about Apollo.
Rating: really liked it
Update... This made the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction. ( good choice)
This was an awesome doggie good Audiobook!!!
Read by...Hillary Huber
It’s dry... it’s sly..., it’s never dull!!!!
It’s also quite beautiful and touching.
It’s about a friend, a man, a suicide, a dog, - *Apollo*- and 3 wives....
It takes place in New York... with writers and writing seminars.
There’s no escaping sadness - loss - grief and death ..., but if you love dogs and literature with great dialogue.....
....recognize a fabulous voice narrator when you hear one - this is a wonderful choice.
Slip this book in between a tragic WWII book or a Political American non fiction frightening book.
Love the uniqueness this book is!
Rating: really liked it
Update: Bumping my rating down to 2 stars. The more I think about it the more I don't think the author's intentions were executed well.
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This book was a miss for me, but I’ve decided not to rate this 2 stars since I think that’s just a matter of my personal preference rather than the objective quality of the book. It’s less of a story and more a string of musings about literature, life, and death, and how interconnected they can be. The book aims to be thought-provoking but I did not feel moved or attached to the writing, despite my adoration for dogs and penchant for overthinking. I think the book has a very niche audience that just isn’t for me.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 Stars
”The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.” Loss, loneliness, the writing life, friendship, grieving, memories, love in all its various forms, between people, and with our pets - in this story, with a dog. But not just any dog, a larger than life sized dog, a harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, who is mourning the loss of his human, a man, a writer, who has taken his own life. These are some of the themes examined in this thought-provoking novel.
”If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.” Apollo comes to live with our narrator, a friend of the deceased at the request of his widow, his third wife. He’s much too much for her to handle in her spacious place, and she’s not interested in trying to make it work. Apollo was
his dog, and she has no interest in keeping him. It’s clear from the start that Apollo is mourning the loss of the man, but quietly accepts the transfer to this strange new woman, despite her building having a no dogs allowed policy.
This is not a plot-driven book, it weaves through thoughts, the past, her frustration with her students’ grasp of the English language and simple sentence construction, her growing fondness for this new being sharing her life, and missing the easy friendship with her former friend, Apollo’s former master. The writing is lovely in its sparseness, adding a graceful simplicity to this story that reads more like a memoir that wanders hither and yon, always returning to the tie that binds her to Apollo. In the beginning of their days together, she keeps Apollo more out of a sense of obligation to her friend, something to bond them now that he’s gone. As time passes, her focus changes, and she becomes almost single-mindedly devoted to Apollo, who has now become her dog in every sense, they have bonded. The grief is still there, it is one of the things they share, but in sharing that grief a bond has nevertheless been formed.
”They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.” Clever and darkly amusing, this flits from topic to topic, never staying with one too long. A tribute to life and all that includes, all of the ugly, dark and painful sides of life, balanced by the loveliness of life, and the love we share through our words, spoken or written.
Many thanks, once again, to the Public Library system, and the many Librarians that manage, organize and keep it running, for the loan of this book!
Rating: really liked it
Worst blurb ever:
”...a moving story about love, friendship, grief, healing and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.”
I’m not sure the person who wrote the blurb actually read the book.
The book was much more about writing and the writerly life than it was a book about grief and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. I found certain passages beautifully written, but I didn't enjoy the book as a whole. There were some brilliant passages about the dog every once in a while, which demonstrated that the author knows dogs well. She also has a wry wit that I enjoyed and I highlighted more than a few sentences/passages.
However, I grew very weary of all the musings about writing and found myself skimming large sections. There was a lot of complaining about how hard the writing life is, and she insulted authors who aren’t “literary” enough, those who self-publish and/or write romance novels, and readers who don’t “get it”.
Which felt extremely pretentious and mean-spirited.
2.5 stars
Rating: really liked it
3.5 Loss and loneliness are the main themes explored in this novel about friendship and the life of writing. When a woman loses her best friend and mentor to suicide she tries to understand his actions, deal with the loss of this person, and takes on the responsibility of caring for his aged, Great Dane, named Apollo. Apollo is grieving the loss of his former friend and master, and so together they travel a new road.
The writing is elegant, spare, recalling literary entities who were also focused on their pets, finding in them many times more humanity in them than in their regular relationships. The writing is non linear, free flowing thoughts, wandering from their past relationship, to the literary endeavors undertaken by them both, and on to other subjects. Intropsective and melancholy, thoughts turn and twist, the way memories do, and always in the background the ties people have found and loved in their animals. Trivia and insights into animals, their empathy, their understanding, keen sense of smell, the bond forged between them and their human counterparts.
A shorter novel, but I found it fascinating, the way it is pulled together worked for this exceptionally well. We could travel with this young woman as she attempts to come to terms with something unexpected and devastating in her own life. The words, sentences, nothing wasted, we are n her mind, her free flowing thoughts. Her own relationship with the Great Dane and what it comes to mean. This will probably be a book that won't appeal to all, but it did appeal to me. I sometimes sink into these unconventional types of fiction,just float along with the words, and ponder what I'm reading.
ARC from Edelweiss.
Rating: really liked it
A meditation on writing, grief, and friendship,
The Friend follows an unnamed woman as she comes to terms with an old friend's suicide and struggles to take care of the dog he has left behind. The novel is narrated from the woman's perspective, and each of its twelve chapters consists of a series of fragments addressing a wide array of subjects. The flimsy plot in fact feels merely like a jumping-off point for philosophical contemplation; the narrator discusses at length the ethics of animal ownership, sexual harassment, friendships between men and women, divorce, literary composition, pedagogy, and suicide. A pair of twists in the final two chapters adds a dash of drama to the story, but the appeal of the novel lies elsewhere. Nunez's prose is terse and fast moving, and her frequent references to the work of other writers makes her book read as a collage of perspectives. While I value the author's project and admire her style, I often felt
The Friend to be old fashioned in thought and disjointed in form.
Rating: really liked it
I almost bailed on this a couple of times, but it is short and has gotten such critical acclaim that I decided to power through. There is a thin story about a woman grief-stricken over the death of a friend and how she cares for his dog. But a lot of the book is just ramblings about various topics. There is also a lot of whining about how tough it is to be a writer and the state of literature today and how everybody thinks they can write, etc. π
Rating: really liked it
THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez is quite simply one of the best personal narrative novels I've come across concerning dogs and writing. In the same vein as MY DOG TULIP, Nunez alternates philosophizing between her literary musings and the unexpected care she must bestow upon a massive great dane. As a dog lover, I am a sucker for any good dog book, but Nunez's focus not only on the physical complications of a huge dog in tiny spaces, but also upon the heavy philosophical questions that arise for many writers and their pooches is second-to-none. At different times, the subjects of love and loss take the forefront, bouncing back and forth between the death of a close friend and the dog the protagonist takes in after the tragedy.
Both hilarious and heartwarming, while also deeply contemplative and empathic, THE FRIEND is an uncanny exploration of grief and loss while never losing its focus on the power dogs have for humans. Writers often have some type of non-human companion that helps not only with their craft, but their mental state, and this novel perfectly captures that balance; these animals can be an incredible burden at times, but a life without them just seems impossible. The level of empathy a dog bestows upon its owner is paramount, and Nunez showcases the psychological gauntlet these animals put us through and how the rewards always outweigh all other considerations.
A brisk read, filled with heart, humor, and darkness, THE FRIEND was one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had in some time. So much so, in fact, that I look forward to being able to read the book a second time in no time at all.
Rating: really liked it
A gem. A woman writer’s distinguished writer friend, a great philanderer, discovers that young women are no longer physically attracted to him and kills himself. The woman is then saddled with her late friend’s dog, a Great Dane called Apollo. The novel in its early stages reads in part like a response to The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, but richer, each sentence stabbing yet buoyant. The prose is achingly beautiful. Set in a peculiarly literary present day New York with fascinating allusions to writing and writers of all kinds. The story is in part a letter to the deceased, in part about how metoo has perverted our culture. The narrator also teaches a writing course to sex workers, and has to manage this enormous animal who’s mourning for his lost master. I’d like to say more about the novel’s impressive structure but that will require another reading. So, gloriously discursive. Fresh and new.
Rating: really liked it
Wow. Finally. This novel (that doesn’t feel like a novel) strikes three major chords. It made me laugh, ignited my mind and touched my heart.
Quote: Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.
Rating: really liked it
This is a very me book. I'm sure plenty of people will read it and think "eh, that was fine but nothing special." But for me, Nunez gets closer to capturing the essence of grief and friendship than any author I can remember in a long time.
