The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough
Jo Fletcher Books (hardback), 2009
131 Pages
This is a library book, borrowed from The Mitchell.
BLURB FROM THE COVER
Tonight is a special, terrible night.
A woman sits at her father’s bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters – all broken, their bonds fragile – have been there for the past week, but now she is alone.
And that’s always when it comes.
The clock ticks, the darkness beckons.
If it comes at all.
EXTRACT
There is a language to dying. It creeps like a shadow alongside the passing years and the taste of it hides in the corners of our mouths. It finds us whether we are sick or healthy. It is a secret hushed thing that lives in the whisper of the nurses’ skirts as they rustle up and down our stairs. They’ve taught me to face the language one syllable at a time, slowly creating an unwilling meaning.
REVIEW
The Language of Dying was brilliant. I read it in half an hour or so. I got sucked in from the first page and could not stop reading until I’d reached the end. The Language of Dying is a simple story of a man nearing the end of his life who children gather around him. However, The Language of Dying is much more than the sum of its parts. Pinborough offers something very real and brutally honest with The Language of Dying. Pinborough’s novel is beautifully written and some scenes are truly haunting. I loved the way the story effortlessly weaves back and forth in time from the present to the narrator’s past including her marriage to an abuser and various memories of her father’s last illness and her experiences growing up. I found her memories of her marriage extremely painful to read and her ordeal actually brought me to tears. I really like the subtle way The Language of Dying explores the relationships between the narrator and her siblings and their drunken parents. The family is not a happy one and bring a whole new meaning to the word dysfunction. Even when the last glue holding their fragile sibling bond together is breaking away they can’t quite pull themselves together. I found the ending of The Language of Dying quite shocking and unexpected. Overall, this was a beautiful and heart-breaking novella.
RATING
