Wildheart: The Daring Adventures of John Muir

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the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.’

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector | Goodreads Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector | Goodreads

In spite of Lispector's apparently foreign-sounding Portuguese (she was born in the Ukraine) which the translator has translated into slightly foreign-sounding English, the author somehow succeeds in conveying the truth and meaning of Joana's conflicting emotions to the reader. There is a naturalness and spontaneity about the writing that makes the many impossibilities in the text possible. I can imagine that if anyone set out consciously to write the way Lispector does, or if she herself tried to repeat this kind of writing, it might not work so well. It works here because there are twenty three years of uncensored feeling poured into it. Sometimes she rebelled distantly: life is long ... She feared the days, one after another, without surprises, of pure devotion to a man. To a man who would freely use all of his wife's forces for his own bonfire, in a serene, unconscious sacrifice of everything that wasn't his own personality. Viper is such a wonderful hero. Arrogant, funny charming and sexy as all hell, but he’s an absolute sweetheart who loves deeply. After all that he went through in Cement Heart, my heart broke for him watching him go through even more heartache, but his journey is beautifully written I've seen this described stylistically as stream-of-consciousness but, technically speaking, it isn't: it's too unfractured at the sentence level, too syntactically correct (at least in English translation). It is, though, deeply introspective and the movement of the story, such as it is, traces the psychic journey of Joana, a journey that has no ending other than death so that she's always in an open state of becoming. Me: If I’m not mistaken, The Wakefield benefit show for Scott Sorry was your first time performing with The Wildhearts since Scarborough in 2005. Has your body thawed yet after those arctic conditions?Although Helen Griffiths retired from writing junior fiction some 30 years ago, her books are still being read by fans and new readers in various parts of the world, perhaps because the themes are timeless and therefore don't date. In my review of The Complete Stories, I neglected to say what a sensory experience Lispector's writing is, which is also true of this, her first novel. Certain passages I’ve highlighted help explain for me how integral the mixture of senses is to her vision and her unique voice. Michelle has been taking care of everyone. She's compassionate, caring, and sweet. But she has been through difficult times already, and now dealing with Viper's moods and behavior along with all of her duties is frustrating and disappointing to her.

Wild Heart by Beth Ehemann | Goodreads Wild Heart by Beth Ehemann | Goodreads

Near To the Wild Heart did not speak to my heart. I found it cynical, bleak, and disturbing. It reflected, perhaps, something of the angst, passion, frustrated dreams of the young writer herself. However, the narrative epiphanies were dark and oblique right from the get-go, starting with Joana as an exasperating child in a middle-class family, her resentment at being adopted by an aunt after she was orphaned, to her unhappy marriage and its doomed dissolution. It was a joyless read even when one of the chapters was titled ‘Joana’s Joy”.One moment stayed with me. In one of her ‘now, now, now’ moments when Joana kept on pestering her father on what to do to fill her time, he had exploded, “Go bang your head against the wall!” It seemed that Joana spent the rest of her life doing just that.

Wild Heart (Peacock Books) by Helen Griffiths | Goodreads Wild Heart (Peacock Books) by Helen Griffiths | Goodreads

The more we read about Joana, the more we realize that like day and night, and brightness and darkness, she is full of contradictions and oppositions: She was sadly a happy woman....Happiness was erasing her, erasing her... It is not fun or easy to read. The style is one of extreme introspection and stream of consciousness. I think many people go through this kind of thing at the cusp of adulthood. She wrote the book when she was nineteen. I think I went through it but I didn't know or understand what it was and I sure didn't talk about it to anyone, except maybe a little with a friend of my parents who was nothing like my parents.

This is such a gorgeous story. Cement Heart showed us Viper getting his girl, this is the story of him keeping her. It was definitely heartbreaking at times, but the emotion was beautifully written and I felt every moment. And it was worth every bit of pain for the swoony happy ending, and double epilogue that finished off Viper’s story perfectly.