"Absolution" by Patrick Flanery *****

•  Early Review edition
•  American author
• Debut novel
• Originally published 2012
• Quotes I Like: - 
• p.5 - "...because that's what an African writer was supposed to have, the wild clutched to her bosom, suckling the continent, all those tired imperial fantasies." 
• p.7 - "In my experience, governments mostly take very little notice of what private citizens have to say unless they say it in unison." 
• p.9 - "We all know how people suffer over the unexpected, violent death of a family member. It is fundamentally no different for the family of a murdered innocent or the family of an executed criminal. It is vivisection. It is limb loss. No prosthetic can substitute. The family is crippled." 
• p.47- "In my case the censor was a bodily invader, always with me, entirely within me, internally bloodsucking." 
• p.47 - "I wrote books, effectively, which the censors could not understand, because they lacked the intelligence to read beyond the surface, and the surface itself was almost opaque to them,darkness etched in darkness." 
• p.71 - "And that is when one knows that the censor has won, because, ultimately, what the censor most desires is not total control of information but for all writers to self-censor." 
• p.72 - "She was an internal doppelganger, hovering just behind me with a blue pencil, poised to attack." 
• p.121 - "Biography is cannibalism and vampirism." 
• p.162 - "This is how she appears to me, and these are her words, as I recorded and transcribed them, but when I reread them I find I've lost who she is: that system of continuous small explosions, contained in a tall pouch of skin."....Clare about Laura 
• p.171 - "You know that I don't ask for absolution, since that's something you don't believe in and therefore can't give or won't give.".....Laura to Clare in final letter 
• p.180 - "The thought of deaths you had caused - deaths for which you alone were ultimately responsible - filled the whole of you, was played into fullness by a song beating through your memory. You were deep inside yourself, absorbed, death filling you past the point of contentment, erfullte sie wie Fulle, sweetened by the thought of your own death, the death that must come, that might arrive within the hour or the next day."...Clare writing about Laura, but possibly expressing her own feelings abut herself s well 
• p.197 - "I do no know, in the end, how much influence parents can have over the beliefs of their children, or how they choose to act on those beliefs. One can but sow the seed and provide the proper environment, and hope that the flower promised by the illustration on the packet is the one that will grow, trust that the hybrid will not revert to the characteristics of some earlier generation, or be so transformed by unpredictable and wholly external factors-- a drought, a storm, environmental pollution--that the seed mutates and something unrecognizable grows." 
• p.214 - "I dance with steps of my own devising, an unbalanced dervish, hair in the wind, a blue crane, a crone. I keen as I should have keened before."...Clare tries to summon Laura's spirit to her 
• p.215 - " I no longer care if I am seen and thought mad--or worse, sane and an agent of evil."....Clare 
• p.221 - "Comforting fantasies are undoing this world, By the laws of comforting fantasies one group feel it right and roper to subjugate all others."....Clare about the notion of free will 
• p.229 - "I like this idea. God as creator whose creations are all perhaps no more than counterfeits of lost originals which probably no longer exist, if they ever did."......Clare 
• p.233 - "...and began to understand that Wald's stories were not only spaces to inhabit as real as the house he lived in with his aunt, the house he might have hoped to live in with Clare herself, but they were also keys that opened the library of his memory.".....Sam about the books by Clare he read as a youth......."If he could not actually live with Clare, he could live in the house of her words." 
• p.252 - "They are the ones who see all whites as parasites, and they are the analogs to those of the old regime who saw all blacks as terrorists or idles. It may only be a matter of time before the likes of me, and you in particular given the nature f your work, are described as enemies of the state. We are the new sleeper cells, the plotters inn the dark. To dissent now is to commit treason, in a way that could not even have been imagined by the old apartheid government." 
• p.258 - "A state of unlimited privacy would inevitably be a state of chaos--a state that could not for long remain a state." 
• p.269 - "What safer way to write about the self than from a distorting distance?"...Clare about her memoir 
• p.271 - "Life since the death of his parents had felt like a series of corners; a corner of his aunt's small house; a corner of a room or a series of rooms at school and then at university; a corner of an airplane cabin; a corner of his dorm room in New York....Sarah offered more than a corner."...Sam about Sarah 
• p.272 - "before coming to New York he had always assumed that Britain was his country's model and frame of reference, but the longer he spent in the city, he realized how wrong he must have been. America felt like his country in different terms,its inverse and possibility, its cultural twin and opposite." 
• p.281 - "Simply, the case is this: investing oneself in the institution of family is always about the partial annihilation of self." 
• p.293 - "I think about provocation. Was it possible for a white woman of privileged background , who could only be a beneficiary of this country's unjust system, to feel provoked into attack or provoked into aiding and abetting an attack?" 
• p.294 - "I look at what our democratic country has become, at the way civic violence has been forged as its currency and coat of arms, and I wonder whether nonviolent civil disobedience, notwithstanding the sluggishness of its progress might have been the better way to win liberation. India achieved it thus; it may be an unequal society, but one can walk its streets for the most part without fear."...Clare 
• p.308 - "But there is also fatigue in its pages, beneath which courses a puzzled anger at the way the world has turned out"....Sam's review of Clare's memoir...."Clare seems to say, the country has shown itself to be a cruel microcosm for the way the world really is, the war of all against all, red in tooth and claw, a waking nightmare of exploitation and corruption and hideous beauty that appears doomed never to end or to end in only one possible way." 
• p.309 - "The Law is a good antidote, my own pair of binoculars. Clare wondered if he knew how little one could see though binoculars--detail of one small object at a distance, but nothing around it or in between: the thing but not the context for the thing."...Clare in conversation with son, Mark 
•  Ideas I Like:
• Clare like the physical layout of the court, populace audience set above the justices, lawyers below both 
• "Absolution", the title of the memoir being written by Clare, the protagonist > Clare and he husband hid books....Laura acted outside the law 
• Characters: 
• Clare, famous author, aging, seeking absolution for perhaps aiding in the murder f her sister and brother-in-law, and for not mothering her daughter the way she ought to have, and for denying responsibility for Sam 
• Nora: Clare's sister, abusive to her, tried to take child away 
• Laura: Clare's daughter, believed to be anti-apartheid activist, actually a double agent - Sam: child of Laura's co-conspirators, Clare responsible for their accidental death when car bomb detonated early 
• Sarah: Sam's American wife 

• Review: It is difficult to believe that this is a debut literary effort! The writing is masterful, dreamlike, and gripping. The form of the novel reels the reader into a confusion of dream, truth, and untruth, creating the confusion which is the primary theme of the novel. What is truth? What is history? What can ever be known for certain? This is true for personal and social history as portrayed in this wonderfully woven story of the pursuit of both personal and national absolution. Absolution is sought for actions taken, actions which are perceived differently by each individual as well as factions within one nation, both before and after apartheid in South Africa. Patrick Flanery is an author who has set a high standard for himself in this first novel. I look forward to seeing what comes next from this new literary voice.