Although they never married, Smart bore Barker four children, and their liaison raged across many years. A stirringly progressive novel, the plot of unrequited, or more potently rejected, love is used as a sheath in which to smuggle a female articulation of selfhood in complete and robust detail, showing the interior life of a woman demonised by her society. From the corner where the hill turns from the sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things, I stand disinterestedly examining the instruments and the pattern of my fate. Una fecundidad capaz de alumbrar una obra tan bella y conmovedora como En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré; una joya literaria que sorprende por su plasticidad y por su pasión, pero también por el uso que Elizabeth Smart hace del lenguaje, tan rico y libre como su forma de amar.

Es de una belleza abrumadora, que a algunos puede llegar a agotar y que a otros puede provocar incluso hilaridad.

Porque eso es En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré, situado a medio camino entre la poesía y la novela; imágenes de una intensidad y una belleza fuera de lo común. i have to keep the two-stars for that is how i felt when i really read it, but might i suggest reading this when you are in the throes of some sort of emotional tidal wave? Esta es la historia que hay detrás de En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré –diferente de la que había imaginado al leer el título, pero igualmente conmovedora–, pero los sentimientos cobran tal intensidad en este libro que los hechos apenas tienen importancia. This contained moments of sweeping, all-encompassing truth and beauty interspersed with shallow angst and stunted, introspective thinking. i can feel raymond carver hurling an empty bottle of booze at this sentence in disgust, and for once, i am with him.

The first piece is about the feelings of being in love with someone attainable but not fully attainable. Es un libro totalmente desanclado de la época en el que fue escrito, sus influencias se remontan a la poesía medieval, con tópicos literarios que van desde el "yo soy la más grande amadora que jamás ha existido" hasta el "los que nos rodean son unos materialistas que no pueden entender el amor y tienen envidia de nosotros". Thousands of miles away, Barker was teaching at a university in Japan at the time, but that day in Better Books, on London's Charing Cross Road, Smart came across his poem Daedalus and was instantly smitten. This book is referenced not just by the title, but because a few lines of it are quoted at a key point in the story.I was young, in my second year of university, in the process of having my heightened idea of self which seems to cling to all 19 ( or there abouts) year-olds dismantled very abruptly. Y aunque estas imágenes, casi abstractas en ocasiones, transmiten con viveza los sentimientos de su autora, el relato de su relación con Barker apenas se puede seguir en el texto.

You may wonder what Smart had done that was so awful as to ignite such scorn and venom in her own mother? Fueron tiempos duros –la guerra, los altibajos en la relación con George, el rechazo de la sociedad por su vida escandalosa– que dejaron su huella en el texto. The novel is written in the present tense, with sparse dialogue, and the singular consciousness of the speaker as the readers guide to every aspect of the inhabited world. I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world of sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood. Pero no fue así; llorar hubiera significado no entender nada de lo que cuenta Elizabeth Smart: cuando se elige amar plenamente o se gana todo o se pierde todo, pero no hay drama.Pero es una auténtica joya, una joya frágil que todo lector tiene que manipular con cuidado, porque es una joya con ángulos afilados y una se puede fácilmente cortar con ella. Philosophy, like lichens, takes centuries to grow and is always ignored in the Book of Instructions. I don’t think this was the right novel for me at the time I read it- I picked it because I wanted to hit my 52 book goal for the end of the year, I already owned it but had never read it, and the length was right (nice and short! My room echoes with the screams she never uttered, and under my floor the vines of remorse get ready to push up through the damp.