Henk's Reviews > Held

Winner of the Canadian Giller Prize! 🏆🇨🇦📖
Deservedly shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize and having read the entire longlist, this is my favourite, and it is due a reread!
This is a book I should not have listened to, but have read and savoured instead. The timelines and jumps are partly to blame, but the luminous, poetic language, while achingly beautiful, made it even harder to really fully digest and appreciate the novel as an audiobook
Terror can spring from what is most ordinary, just as love can

Held reminded me a bit of Love and Other Thought Experiments, a Booker longlister of 2020, in the way this is an utterly original book that doesn’t concern itself overly with being fully understood on the first reading. In short chapters, scattered through the decades, we are offered stories of love and struggle. Starting of beautifully with a scene of soldier in WW I, we move through countries and places, find lovers related to the aforementioned soldier and his love Helena, who are driven away from each other by war and a need for justice.

The interrelation between great history happening and interacting with small, particular lives across decades, seems a key topic of the author. Maybe most eloquently the approach the book takes is summed up in this quote about photography, an important part of the longest second chapter: If you hold the shutter open long enough everything moving disappears

The language (while gorgeous) and structure of small chapters after the first two sections of the book, do make the struggle of the characters at times feel strangely ethereal. The 1920 section, focusing on a photography studio with potentially supernatural elements was interesting and rivalled the start of the book on the battlefield, but many of the chapters that follow have an almost impressionistic quality. The war nurse family section is also strong, reflecting on what it means to be driven onwards and doing the right thing even if all the odds are not in your favour. In a sense this is a modern expression of faith, which is one of the key themes of the novel. This chapter reminded me a bit of a section of the The Bone Clocks, where we also have a section focussed on a character going to a war zone, in this case Iraq.

Even Marie Curie suddenly shows up near the end. Besides the relation to the reflections on faith versus science this felt slightly random for me, but again I see and appreciate the quality of this work and will be rereading it properly.

Quotes:
Perhaps the most important things we know can’t be proven

Was an error deliberately made still an error?

What we give cannot be taken from us

Faith uses the mechanism of doubt to prove itself. It is absence that proofs what was once present. We can understand without proof he thought, we can prove without understanding.

Everytime we disguise the truth we weaken our will

How many parts can be taken from us before we are no longer ourselves

The countless inner adjustments we make to be in the world, to accommodate our loneliness, our ache for reunion

Perhaps we are only send exactly the proof we can believe.

We can’t take money for a miracle

What history is war writing in our bodies now?

That the mechanism that disproves something is also the very mechanism of proof, and what we do not believe teaches us what we do believe. Faith is a mechanism just as love is, proving itself, once and for all and again and again, by its disappearance.

Was rescue always a kind of love?
But he did know with certainty that love was always a kind of rescue.

Who can say what happens when we are remembered?