I've just finished The Death of the Heart -- and frankly, I'm not sure what to say. This is a celebrated novel of the interwar period, and Bowen is herself regarded as one of the lasting stylists of the twentieth century.
Part of the challenge, for me, is exactly that: Bowen's style. I found Death to be a real challenge to read: Bowen's syntax is complex, meandering. It's not Victorian in its density, but it's not far from it. And there's the matter of her characters, too: again, for me, the drama depicted in Death unravels in a fashion that's so painfully bourgeois. None of these characters -- neither men nor women -- appear likable: even Portia Quayne, whose awakening serves as the foundation for the novel, appears needy and naive. If is she mistreated by family and friends, that mistreatment failed to generate a sense of sympathy or emotion. Indeed, I was not sure whether this amounted to mistreatment at all -- or whether was, instead, the normal course of life.
Ultimately, the question, I think, is whether young people -- around sixteen, say -- can experience a 'death of the heart.' Bowen seems to think this is possible, but I, again, have my doubts: certainly, they can experience profound emotions (and I would not seek to minimize or demean that). But to commit a novel of this length to what amounts to one or two moments of disappointment or confusion is trying. In the end, I found myself rooting for no one in particular: I simply wanted all of the thinking to end, and a more sensible version of life to emerge.
I was really puzzled by it too - in case you are interested, I wrote about it here (I should add that it was not without impact for me in that I still think about the book quite often, because I feel I missed something important, but I still don’t know what; it is powerful in some strange - to me at any rate - way): https://zmkc.blogspot.com/2017/10/battered-penguins-death-of-heart-by.html
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