Ebook154 pages5 hours
The Bruise
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this ebook
Winner of Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction
The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
Related to The Bruise
Related ebooks
Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Front Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHeat Wake Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Man on the Tower: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Young Recruit Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Book of Hours Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHorses Dream of Money: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On the Shores of Welcome Home Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Anon: Selected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCriss Cross Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lesser Fields Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Home Burial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mother Box and Other Tales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of Lockdown 2020 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYear of the Rat Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFort Necessity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrigger Dance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Step in the Right Direction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlyover Country: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTravelers Leaving for the City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLike Blood in Water: Five Mininovels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSunshine on an Open Tomb Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClean and Well Lit Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Pretty Sight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Astonishment Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Children with Enemies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Literary Fiction For You
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prophet Song: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Nigerwife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salvage the Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Camp Zero: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Bruise
Rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
4/5
10 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I went to a CAConrad reading because I had heard many good things about him but had never read much except a poem here and there online, and it was at this reading that another reader also impressed me and her name was Magdalena Zurawski. She brought her dog with her, a little white thing who she placed on a chair while she read, and afterwards I bought her book and she signed it. When I came home and added her book on Goodreads, I realized that it was already on my to-read shelf, along with several hundred others that I routinely forget about, and that I had become interested in her book a while back when I read one of her blog entries that made me curious about her voice.
Immediately, I was captivated by the voice of M-- who doubts herself at every turn, but not in the way that Bernhard's characters do, with all that dizzying semantic motion, and all that excess that produces involuntary guffaws in me, though there is an obvious stylistic reference there, but more perhaps like Lydia Davis in its neuroticism, yet ultimately less distancing than either of them, so that its style did not become a barrier, but a way of entry, so that it reminded me a bit of Sheila Heti's book which I read in an equal amount of zeal, but like that book, it has the ability to surprisingly disarm the reader, with pure emotion and honesty, though reassuring the reader all the while with its knowingness, that this will not be some vacant gesture or icky flick.
Thus the first half of the book grabbed me with its realness though realness is a weird word for it because the narrator was struggling precisely with her realness. She was struggling with the role of her imagination, and the fittingness of her own skin to this detached occupier of the bruise, which is constantly watching herself watch herself. But I loved the angel she invents that takes a physical form in the evidence of the bruise. And how murkily that was written, so that the imagined had, if anything, more force than the real. But a messy force.
But I felt that about halfway in, the book loses a certain something. It gets tedious, and I no longer buy that it is trying to do this thing, but rather that it has started to do this thing and so it must continue. The searching becomes an empty form of the search, just there to satisfy the reader's thirst for the story of the search, and not a genuine one because the genuine search I felt was in the beginning, with the angel and the bruise and G-- and the school cafeteria and her first thoughts of L--. Maybe what made that part seem real to me was how chaotic it was, and how not at all like a search, but more just the narrator being confused about everything, and that rang true with me. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I nicely bought this as a gift and then began to read it on the plane home and I'll say this, it's really good. I was just at the AWP and having the feeling that a person can have sometimes which is where are the interesting and smart queer fiction writers, and okay so she's a poet, but still. More TK.
Book preview
The Bruise - Magdalena Zurawski
1^ book_preview_excerpt.html mYێܸig7Fl.#%Q-)R!iw|IΩjΌDrowonvoď'G<}9]ޝL/n0>j)&&Eu0lg_Sॼ(~Cf-X~S4>tnLY_5G|'7<T-6ӭLv0!Jͯ's!Rh-R+ArRl曱}(&|zH{Sq'3'u^;*Of a-gcQ:_1k>nIiqIj2^`]_ÍNs`k
ڰPA7VkekewwŸyOkj/NU*Ή4 L ߋ^"J< Z.$;g}HЀwv ::ªexm
mGG\';r!-u2T$2!ETtlKlϒ
@RaJvko̓Ym)!E&8>
um9D}&pdZL5fFh>p~#5"n
]71Vy)@`n~m AZK8#V}]3ƄN
k8B+l?1'V{oQwa?
5cϣӉ\ܬyf7rò~u\,K0Ϛ`;*[W5
`F->ENZg6,
;d~\(Ld:b%f4Zv-X(?*(7wJURlz[07{N;R#<2pNes8T?-eDɒ阮5WGաP'k59nS,9u t tBwSm;0,8%ߋQBÂby
HX8kDHCpRʠR+ϘtYMS:V.8&72(K~M8/vtaE?8Ha`4;7MAuC|RTQtH$Kc
k}s%ADGdN|^@7v B\Ho:nGk5XG^?
&BP5>O{чʚFu}.8W'{)3[ζ5fjvխn2Ϋo9J
<봑5^F.@z2AڿUf2'ntjW;g&paNw7K욃s^@@t&[PDC4[4o2!\ԠiX* W&