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A review by lonesomereader
How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell
4.0
Sometimes when staying in a foreign city the physical estrangement you feel from your homeland can match your mental state. “How Pale the Winter Has Made Us” opens with its English narrator Isabelle learning that her father has committed suicide in Crystal Palace, London. She’s been staying in Strasbourg with her partner who has recently flown to South America for an extended trip to pursue his medical work. A typical response to such news would be for Isabelle to immediately fly home to England to attend the funeral and be with her remaining family. But instead she chooses to stay in her partner’s empty flat and roam the streets of Strasbourg researching the lives of people who’ve been memorialised in the city’s statues, museums, literature and photos found in the stalls of street vendors. She finds that “Grief does strange and terrible things to the mind; rationality disintegrates into the air.”
We only receive snippets of her own personal history with her family and partner, but these relationships are certainly strained. Amidst long passages of research there occasionally appear italicised hate-filled accusations from her mother (who she refers to as a “harridan”) which might be real messages, memories or entirely imagined. Occasional recollections of her father and his single-minded pursuit of painting are steeped in resentment. But throughout most of the narrative Isabelle blocks the intrusion of personal details in favour of her research. This process of consciously alienating herself from the reality back home and immersing herself in fragments from history is a way of avoiding the immediacy of emotion and searching for a way to centre herself again. As we follow her intellectual journey over the course of winter we witness an individual’s disintegration of self alongside the spectral resurrection of a city’s history.
Read my full review of How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell on LonesomeReader
We only receive snippets of her own personal history with her family and partner, but these relationships are certainly strained. Amidst long passages of research there occasionally appear italicised hate-filled accusations from her mother (who she refers to as a “harridan”) which might be real messages, memories or entirely imagined. Occasional recollections of her father and his single-minded pursuit of painting are steeped in resentment. But throughout most of the narrative Isabelle blocks the intrusion of personal details in favour of her research. This process of consciously alienating herself from the reality back home and immersing herself in fragments from history is a way of avoiding the immediacy of emotion and searching for a way to centre herself again. As we follow her intellectual journey over the course of winter we witness an individual’s disintegration of self alongside the spectral resurrection of a city’s history.
Read my full review of How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell on LonesomeReader