Grief is the thing with feathers

by Max Porter

Paper Book, 2016

Status

Available

Collection

Publication

London : Faber & Faber, 2016.

Description

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal. In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief - Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.--… (more)

Media reviews

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is heartrending, blackly funny, deeply resonant, a perfect summation of what it means to lose someone but still to love the world – and if it reminds publishers that the best books aren’t always the ones that can be pigeonholed or precis-ed or neatly packaged,
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so much the better.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member msf59
“I lay back, resigned, and wished my wife wasn't dead. I wished I wasn't lying terrified in a giant bird embrace in my hallway.”

“I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park,
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enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is...”

After his wife dies suddenly, a man and his two young sons are plunged into a spiral of pain and despair.
The man is working on a biography of the poet, Ted Hughes and at the family's nadir, the father is visited by
Crow, the infamous trickster, that is featured in Hughes work. The bird is here to heal and comfort the grief-stricken.

This is an amazing debut. It is a potent novella, packed with dazzling verse. Despite it's dark themes, it also contains humor and glimmers of hope. One more quote, (I bookmarked a multitude):

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”
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LibraryThing member Kristelh
This little book is a novel, not a memoir but you could be tricked into thinking it is a memoir. It can be compared to such works as Grief Observed, Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk — and Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, all of which are memoirs written by authors from their grief. The title
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made me think of Emily Dickenson Hope is a thing with feathers, it seems like something she might have wrote. and when I opened the book, I find this epigram, "That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove--Emily Dickinson but the author or rather CROW has struck out Love, Love, Freight and groove and penciled in CROW. Grief is the Thing With Feathers is a wondrous, supremely literary, ultimately hopeful little book. The jacket flap describes the book as part novella, part polyphonic (multiple voice) fable, part essay on grief. So experimental in structure, it is a debut noel for Max Porter who lives in London with his wife and children. I liked the use of CROW. Use of black birds like crows and blackbirds are often used in books. There is reference in the book of Ted Hughes' Crow (poet) and to Plath (they had been married). Use of mythology, crows carrying the souls to the land of the dead. Even in Noah's ark, the first bird sent from the ark was a raven while the earth was covered with the dead.

The book is written in short, little small blocks rather than lots of sentences into paragraphs and jumps from one voice to the next (Crow, Dad, Boys) So there is a shifting perspective but mostly it is about how dad deals with his grief and how his grief ends up effecting the boys. The author is drawn to Ted Hughes and Emily Dickinson. The sections progress as the dad makes his way through the experience of grief and the reader can see that progression. I actually read a library copy. It is a paperback, the book was published originally 2015 in London and my copy was published by Graywolf Press a Minneapolis based publisher. The cover has three windows, one with shade up, shade half down and one with shade all the way down and off to the side is the title and a little black crow in flight or just landing in the upper right corner. There are a lot of white space and a dropped feather here and there. The author wanted to write about grief but used his love of his wife and boys as his foundation and the grief he experienced when his father died. The author did a good job because it felt like a memoir and I could compare this book to the memoirs by C.S.Lewis, MacDonald's and Didion. So I give this book 4.5 stars and would round up to 5 rather than down. This book should really resonate with me because I like books about grief, I liked CS Lewis's book Grief Observed, Didion's book is one of my favorites and I also love Emily Dickinson's work. I have not read Ted Hughe's Crow. Perhaps I need to do that.
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LibraryThing member kcshankd
Almost a pamphlet. Very brief fable, heavily oversold. It was okay.
LibraryThing member Cassmet
*ARC provided for honest review*

Wow. To begin with I will just say again, wow. This book surprised and intrigued me, not with its storyline or creative plot, not with inventive world-building, but with its sheer force of will, with its language and its comprehensive reaching.

The best descriptor I
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can think of for this novella, is that, at its core, this book is a eulogy to mourning, to grief. A disruptive and broken poetics dictates the pace as language, embodying mourning, confronts the paradoxes and gritty realities inherent in grief.

Max Porter delivers a varied exploration of reaction—visceral and complex—to loss in the form of a delusion, a coping mechanism, a crow, a thing with feathers. In short, this wonderfully written, uniquely conceived novella is a many-faceted reflection on human response to grief.
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LibraryThing member Ken-Me-Old-Mate
I give this 5 stars because the main character is not just a crow, but the crow from Ted Hughes or at least the spirit of the crow that Ted Hughes got close to. This book does that too.

I also give it 5 stars because it deals with death and loss in a real and meaningful way.

It is short and can be
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read quickly. I'd recommend savouring it and only at night when you are in bed and don't have to be anywhere else.

Can't say enough good things and don’t want to dilute my thoughts either so just read it.
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LibraryThing member TheEllieMo
Max Porter's version of grief is a foul-mouthed crow that talks in riddles, and which gets less foul-mouthed as time moves on.

I started reading Grief is a Thing with Feathers the day after I had suffered a loss, thinking perhaps it would help me, provide some solace.

It didn't. I got through a few
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pages and thought it was absolute tosh.

I put it to one side, got on with life, read a bit of escapist trash, read a couple of books for my monthly club, and then came back to this. Would it make more sense, almost two months on?

No, not really. It was still mostly tosh. The crow is still annoying (perhaps if I had read Ted Hughes' book I'd understand it more).

There are some really lovely passages in this book (mostly under the Boys' heading), but only maybe a dozen pages out of the 128 pages of the book. I know for some people, the Crow is a great illustration of grief that they have experienced, but it just didn't work for me.
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LibraryThing member eachurch
Wildly inventive. A powerful portrayal of grief.
LibraryThing member adrianburke
forget the hype
this is tripe
i paid my whack
now i want it back
LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl
The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying 'OH NO YOU DON'T
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COCK-CHEEK'. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

A woman dies suddenly, leaving behind her husband and two young sons. As they negotiate the days, months and years that follow, they are accompanied by the physical manifestation of their grief, a large and not entirely benign crow.

I was pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy this book and for the first half that remained largely true. My brother died suddenly last year and grief, it turns out, is both unique to each person and utterly, utterly universal. Porter's understanding of grief is so deep as to move past the differences and grab the heart of it.

Some days I realize I've been forgetting basic things, so I run upstairs, or downstairs, or wherever they are and I say, 'You must know that your Mum was the funniest, most excellent person. She was my best friend. She was so sarcastic and affectionate ...' and then I run out of steam because it feels so crass and lazy, and they nod and say, 'We know, Dad, we remember.'

'She would call me sentimental.'

'You are sentimental.'

The offer me space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.


This is a slight book, told from the alternating viewpoints of the husband, the two sons speaking together, and the crow, who begins as a malevolent and destructive force, then mutates into something approaching, but never quite reaching, comfort.
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LibraryThing member Carmenere
What's in the drinking water in England these days? First up this month was a wine wise fetus and now, a wise and wise cracking crow!
Grief, in the guise of a crow, spreads its wings over a father and his two young sons as they work through the sudden loss of wife and mother. In a Neil Gaiman like
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manner, crow tells us the story of the good days and bad of this threesome and how they slowly come to terms and begin again.
This little gem packed a wallop of emotion in it and, yes, even a few tears were shed. I'd actually go out on a limb and say it's the best book I've read all year.
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LibraryThing member GailNyoka
Novella, poem, meditation. This book is called a novel, and it is an unusual one. It is a book that plays tricks on the mind, one that makes you stop at a sentence just to take in the meaning.

If you have ever lost someone who sings in your soul forever, you will understand this book; it will speak
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to yo in the harsh cry of the crow.
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LibraryThing member ozzer
This short book examines the grieving process following the untimely death of a woman from the perspectives of her husband, two sons and a crow. The latter comes to stay “until you don't need me anymore." Crows and birds in general have been used effectively in literature to represent all kinds
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of dark emotions, so this is not unususal. Yet the crow in this novel serves well as a surrogate for the tough love person who keeps the other characters grounded and guides them through the grieving process and away from magical thinking.

The father character is a scholar who is writing a piece about Ted Hughes’ “Crow: From The Life and Songs of Crow.” Hughes wrote this collection of poems as a way of dealing with his own grief following Silvia Plath’s suicide. This obscure reference is quite apt to his situation, but seems to have been explored so obliquely as to lose much of its power. Instead Porter’s crow seems to be just mundane and intrusive—much like a worldly aunt come to cook and clean for the family following the death.

The writing is filled with imaginative insights on how people think following the death of a loved one. The father becomes weary of all the “template-ready” comments from well meaning friends and muses about all of his wife’s mundane possessions that she will never use again. The boys conger activities designed to keep missing her.

The narrative is well paced and the writing is quite lyrical, reminiscent of a long poem. The writing, however, often is too elliptical for anyone not used to reading poetry.
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LibraryThing member jphamilton
This was a hard-to-find and much-talked-about little book. Now, I have read it ... and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. It was incredibly clever and unique little book about death, love, survival, family, a man without his wife, two boys without their mother, and a crow. The book consists of
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alternating chapters told from the viewpoint of the dad, the boys, and, of course, the crow. It has poetry, near-poetry, and irregular fiction. It may sound like a confusion on the page, but it has a simplicity that I can't yet put into words. I'm still pondering.
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LibraryThing member carolfoisset
Read great reviews on this book and I have found healing through many books related to grief, but this one just did not do it for me. I probably need to discuss it with someone. I felt like I was missing something. Maybe the metaphors were just out of my reach...
LibraryThing member aalyssa0714
I really didn't get this at all. Maybe this thing is riddled with symbolism and hidden messages which, honestly, were way over my head. I knew from the title and from the very first few pages that it's about dealing with grief--the dad and the two sons, twins, have just lost the mother/woman of the
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house and their were grieving over it,the dad more so than the two sons, who were both dealing with their grief in their own way, but were also trying their best not to be something of an added burden (my limited vocabulary couldn't provide any better word) to their father. Then here comes this giant crow whose made himself at home with the family of less one person. The crow was crass, a bit of a narcissist, sarcastic, and definitely has a fondness for violence and gore when given the chance for it.

I wasn't really a fan of the form,written in verse and sometimes, a varied format presented through the careful manipulation of words and phrases in lines and stanzas. I also wasn't much of a fan of the author's writing nor poetic style. I found it severely lacking in trying to achieve an ''effect'' in using this format and theme.

The only bit of the whole book I liked was the part about demon who fed on grief who visited the family, though 'visited' isn't exactly the current word as it never really went past the front door. That part read very much like a fairy tale (without a fairy) and that's the only reason I liked it.
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LibraryThing member Kanikoski
Writing in the shadow of Ted Hughes is a brave act in itself. Writing in the combined shadows of both Ted Hughes and Crow, on a theme that inevitably amplifies echoes of Sylvia Plath for good measure, is literary bravery of the highest order. Max Porter pulls it off to a creditable degree, and part
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of the reason for that is the form that the novel takes. The structural and stylistic approach is light, even when the content is heavily laden. The result is a very good read with barely a word out of place ... but the explicit presence of the Hughes manifestation of Crow gives it baggage that just weighs it down that touch too much for me.
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LibraryThing member mahsdad
As I read on someone else's review of this book, I very rarely get a book based solely on a mainstream review. But after reading an LA Times review of this debut book from Porter, I had to get a copy.

The mother of this family dies suddenly and the father and sons are finding it incredibly hard to
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cope with the loss, especially the Dad. In the midst of that misery, comes a crow. He moves in with the broken family and becomes a confidant, babysitter, counselor. He brings them healing. The father is a literary scholar focusing on Ted Hughes (husband of Sylvia Plath), I never made the connection to the story and Hughes' poetry (especially the epic The Life and Songs of the Crow), until a friend wrote about recently reading Hughes' work. That revelation shifted the tone and meaning of the book into a higher gear for me.

Its a short book, a novella, but its not really a straight line "traditional" narrative. The story keeps flipping back and forth to to little vignettes from Dad, the Crow and the Boys. I'm not a poetry buff, but its really and extended tale told thru free verse. At any rate, its a profound read on grief and the ability to heal and the mechanisms we use. Its my favorite read so far this year. Highly recommend.

Quotes, from the sublime:

"Soft. Slight. Like light, like a child's foot talcum dusted and kissed, like stroke reversing suede, like dust, like pins and needles...like everything nature-made and violent and quiet. Its all completely missing. Nothing patient now."

To the ridiculous:

"If you haven't observed human children after serious quantities of sugar, you must. It raises and deranges them hilariously, for an hour or so, and then they slump. It is uncannily like blood-drunk fox cubs"

10/10

S: 8/2/16 - F: 8/5/16 (4 Days)
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LibraryThing member booklove2
A short, sweet, funny and heartbreaking novella, which also seems more like poetry at times. Grief is a crow when a man's wife and the mother of two small boys dies. I can tell from both the character's obsession with poetry and Porter's style that poetry is a huge influence here. However, poetry
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is usually like a foreign language to me, so the book was not enough like poetry to make me dislike the format. The book is filled with a ton of bizarre and separate snippets of events rather than a plot. (Plot is one of the things Crow is scared of.) But the book is short enough for this not to matter. The writing can be darkly hilarious and then rip your heart out in the next line. The book is like a quick emotional rollercoaster.
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LibraryThing member Lunarreader
A poetic short novella, rythmic writing, noise, sounds, combined with long and winding sentences, all in all very atypical. A bit of a hype this little book and understanding why but not top notch for me.
It describes the broken, unlogical pieces of life someone goes through when suddenly a beloved
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person is lost. Mourning is not logical, not linear and this is what the author tries to let the reader live through when reading this novella.
It's gripping by moments, absurd in others, it's people trying to pick up their lives. In this aspect you could say that the author is succesful in his setup.
But, it does not stick, it doesn't makes you feel sick, i didn't get empathic or emotional and so it stayed a nice poetic narrative, weirdly unfolded and wrapped together again. But not moving, not strangling you like for instance [Sprakeloos] by [[Tom Lanoye]] on the loss of his mother did. Not the wild emotions and sucking in that [De H Is van Havik] by [[Helen Macdonald]] did.
Nice, that's the correct word. Nothing more, nothing less.
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LibraryThing member bodachliath
A moving and tragicomic prose poem which centres on a grieving father and his two young sons as they cope with the sudden death of a wife and mother with the "help" of Ted Hughes's Crow. A deeply original work which deserves the hype - I am no expert on Hughes, and I felt that greater familiarity
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would have made it even more resonant.
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LibraryThing member wildrequiem
My favourite thing about this book is its play on existing poetry. the replacement of emily dickinson's hope for grief is clever and an incredibly honest portrayal of grief - forever perched inside our souls, constantly evolving and adapting, tragic and funny and mundane.
LibraryThing member lindaspangler
really good, very quick read, magical realism on grieving
LibraryThing member 2wonderY
I found this a bit hollow. The last page says the author lives with his wife and children. Is that supposed to be funny or just inadvertently ironic?

This work appeared to me to be an attempt at clever, rather than empathic. Death of a spouse and it's aftermath is not something to be played with.
LibraryThing member asxz
Exceptionally short, but packed. Crow comes to live with a grieving father and kids. And that's about it. Odd and moving. Oddly moving.
LibraryThing member b.masonjudy
There were some brilliant moments in Porter's debut book, particularly the voices of the father and the boys. It could be a compliment that Crow was as grating in Grief as in Ted Hughes work, but I didn't like the Hughes collection. I'm undecided about Crow in this book, at times I think it sheds
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light on loss and healing in a way that's irreverently appropriate and powerful, and other times it felt like a shallow gimmick. I appreciated the ending and the way time loosens in the text as it does when recovering from loss.
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Awards

The Morning News Tournament of Books (Quarterfinalist — 2017)
The British Book Industry Awards (Shortlist — Debut Fiction — 2016)
Guardian First Book Award (Shortlist — 2015)
Dylan Thomas Prize (Winner — 2016)
Goldsmiths Prize (Shortlist — 2015)

Original publication date

2015

Physical description

20 cm

ISBN

9780571327232
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