Not overlooked

PopMatters, a site that apparently offers 'brief reviews of new and overlooked books', has published a review on Douglas A. Martin's book: Branwell.

Douglas Martin's novelization of the little-known life of Branwell Brontë, brother to authors Charlotte and Emily...

And Anne! Coming from a review on a site that specialises on overlooked books they have missed such an opportunity to bring Anne to her more than deserved spotlight.

The follow-up to Martin's debut novel Outline of My Lover, Branwell is more experimental fiction than generic biography. Martin's simple, abstract compositional style frequently betrays the biographical element; his subject often becomes a malleable figment of a fictive imagination. Branwell's sisters provide the historical and literary context (not to mention the star power, so to speak), which allows Martin to thread a dreamlike narrative through well-known pillars of fact.

Branwell's story is set up as a musky, candlelit tragedy from the start. He's preoccupied with the early deaths of his mother and sister, so much that his later years never seem to progress beyond a shadowy state of grief. Martin's language is palpably incandescent, the sensuality of its poetics curtailed by a terse fatalism. The book's episodic snapshots -- each so brief and tactful that it's vaguely profound -- illuminate the beauty in a life's inevitable ruin. It's a consuming and haunting read, one that hides its dark allure in ghosts, insinuations, and recessed crevices of human nature. Branwell, Martin writes, is "a shining example of romantic self-destruction, and of all his sisters' hopes, an embodiment of the fears they each chose to see there, those sides of their characters." Besides the conceptual fodder he comes to represent, Branwell is imbued with flesh and blood, a character whose own misfortunes are as much the product of human anguish as they are high art.

Categories: Branwell_Brontë, In_the_News, Books, Fiction