Weight of Light

Weight of Light
By Andrew Staniland
156 Pages.
Price varies depending on where you are located.
Available on Amazon, Barnes& Noble,Flipkart,eBay,etc.
Genre: Fiction/Literary
ISBN: 1-4116-3409-8

I never realised daily routine like getting up, switching off the alarm clock or just getting ready for work can be expressed so beautifully.

Delphine Romand is a single French woman living in London. The book is about her thoughts, her work, her friends, her music, her likes, her relationships, her family and her life.

The author makes you fall in love with words and Delphine’s world. That he is a poet, gives Staniland the added advantage. His visual style of writing makes the characters come alive. He has a unique style of writing. He uses extremely short sentences, disregards the regular novel format, rebelling against convention adding almost a lyrical quality to the book.

The story is not a poem but prose though the poetic quality is unmistakable. It isn’t narrated directly like Alfred’s Noyes’s poem The Highwayman or the meaning disguised like Robert Frost’s beautiful poem Nothing gold can stay. It is a novel that manages to find midway between the two with a dash of humour. The digs at New Age gurus will make you grin. If you are unmarried or single, you will be able to relate to portions of the world and thoughts of Delphine or her friends. If you are married, it will remind you of someone in your circle of friends or acquaintance who you may have wondered about. It is almost uncanny how the author has managed to get into a woman’s head.

The book reminded me of Bryan Adams’s song “Have you ever really loved a woman”. If you thought literary fiction was boring or just picturesque speech as I did, you will be pleasantly surprised after you read this uniquely lyrical book.

© Deepa Kandaswamy