Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Davis (The Silk Road) conjures real and imagined worlds in this lithe and cerebral exploration of life, death, and the ways both influence craft. When her husband died from cancer in 2019 in his 60s, Davis's vision of their future went with him as well. But as she vividly illustrates in nonlinear, dreamlike vignettes, her memories of their past, and her own, remained. Mining them to make meaning of her loss, she delivers a resonant meditation on impermanence that takes the form of ghost stories; musings on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, whose "genius of conjuring a sense of time" gave young Davis "that shiver of ecstasy that is an unmistakable symptom of the creative act"; an account of a fanciful trip that gets derailed by a blizzard; and a study of Beethoven's Opus 126 that argues transitions--whether they be in music, art, or life itself--deserve the same reverence as their outcomes. Loosely following the trajectory of her marriage to its end, she injects her narration with moments that evoke the infinitude of love: "It's different washing the body after the person has died.... The wish to inflict no harm is still there, elevated by the absence of response to something resembling desire." Bending genre and time, this is a pleasure to get lost in. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
A profound meditation on grief via unglued memories and literary fragments. Central to this brief yet stunning book is the death of Davis' husband, who succumbed to cancer after a long struggle. The acclaimed novelist is well versed in loss. "I'd given death a lot of thought," she writes. "It was one of my favorite topics, in liturgy and literature." An attentive reader and erudite writer, Davis plumbs her internal archive in search of solace and clarity in the face of ineffable tragedy. She writes about her husband in the bardo, a Buddhist term that describes the liminal space between life and death--a place, she explains, where "narrative seems to happen but doesn't." Her husband's memory thrums throughout the memoir, somehow both a presence and an absence. The prose is equally undefinable, caught between poetic and concrete. Like "the story unfolding inside my husband's organs," she writes, "there was a narrative involved that didn't follow conventional rules." Cross-fading vignettes abound with little correlation but remain haunted by a sense that something invisible threads them together. Digressions about Virginia Woolf and Flaubert, the TV show Lost, and Beethoven's bagatelles all miraculously align. Coincidences buzz with fated significance, unmoored and transformed over time. The titular Aurelia was a ship Davis once rode across the Atlantic; as an adult, she would discover a novella by Gérard de Nerval with the same name, but with an accent. "Aurelia," she explains further, "is the Latin translation of the Greek word for chrysalis…emblem of metamorphosis and hiddenness." Regarding memory, she writes, "when someone you have lived with for a very long time dies, memory stops working its regular way--it goes crazy. It is no longer like remembering; it is, more often, like astral projection." These disparate moments transform the memoir into something that flows more like a guided dream, rendered in daring, vulnerable prose, steeped in death but brilliantly transformative. A transcendent work of literary divination. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Davis' darkly imaginative and surreal novels, including The Silk Road (2019) and Duplex (2013), will cue readers to the improbability of her writing a conventional memoir. Instead she presents a series of incisive sketches capturing reverberating moments in her life, including a clearly formative interlude in her Philadelphia childhood, during which her mother read her fairy tales as Davis endured a long bout with pleurisy. Aurelia is the name of the student ship Davis sailed on to Europe, a transformative voyage for a "pretentious girl of sixteen with a prancing intellect and an overweening desire for Romance." Other passages are more daunting, especially the death of her husband and disconcerting episodes in her life as a widow. Davis reflects on memory, the senses, literature (Aurélia is the title of a novella by Gérard de Nerval), and art. In a riveting piece about Beethoven's Bagatelles, Davis considers "the moment between, the ghost-moment," a key motif in this exquisite, lightning-bolt bright, zigzagging, and striking musing on the self, life, death, and the endlessly provocative jumble of the sublime and the absurd, the comic and the tragic.
