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| Subtitle | A Novel of Old New York |
| First Written | 2017 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| ISBN-10 | 1501163876 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1501163876 |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | August 11, 2017 |
Golden Hill
Re-reading again after enjoying Light Perpetual, the new one.
Noted on June 22, 2021
I LOVED this. I was primed to, I guess, by already being a fan of Spufford's other non-fiction work (although I didn't dig his part-history-part-novel Red Plenty). But really, this is very, very good.
Golden Hill is the story of a stranger arriving on New York's shores, and inventing a new provisional life. What his mission is exactly is up in the air, and who he really is is also a mystery. It's got to be incredibly difficult to write a point-of-view character who won't reveal their actual goals or background - but the slow reveal of this is well done, and makes for a page-turner. It's a legitimately FUN read.
Oh, and the New York that our stranger has arrived in is in the 1700s, before the Revolutionary War. Half the people he meets still speak Dutch, and "New York" is just a swampy village of 7000 people, a few streets that today are part of lower Manhattan. It was fun to be partially familiar with the landscape, and fun to imagine it 300 years ago. There's that same pleasure of a well-crafted historical novel that you see in Mantel's Wolf Hall books - where you suddenly see the origin of some modern phrase as a strange new invention.
But setting and lead character aside, Spufford has more to offer. First, he's just an incredible writer - the pacing and flow of this novel are great, and the actual phrasing is just delightful. Second, he's got a grip on a real person's interior life that many novelists don't. If you've read Unapologetic, which I highly recommend, you're going to hear echoes here of the emotional turbulence of seeing your own sinful nature for what it is.
Noted on August 12, 2017
Her wide hips, canted out to exaggerate a swell already near the limit of the probable, spread from her narrow waist like a lyre. Her belly dipped into a crease touched with brownish-pink at her navel, then swelled out again, descending, into a lesser hill, and a lower yet, valleyed and russet-lipped... -- How hard it is to describe a desirable woman without running into geography! Or the barnyard. Or the resources of the fruit-bowl. As if flesh itself, bare vulnerable flesh-of-our-flesh, were not enough, considered merely as itself, and we could not account for its power, without fetching away into similes.
Quoted on June 22, 2021
“Me? Never in life!’ said Smith, giving them his familiar beam of amiability: only now with a ragged carelessness, a desultory approximation, like a man who briefly raises a mask on a stick to his face but cannot be bothered to line up the eye holes.
Quoted on August 12, 2017
It has often been observed, how our desires take strength or force from having a minute dash of repulsion curdled into 'em, the fruit no doubt of our fallen state. Now desire ceded to repulsion altogether. The soft expansive wish to reach for her, with mouth, with tongue, with hands--the bare-skinned greedy gentle unprotected urge to hold, stroke, suck, coddle, transfix--recoiled in alarm, as if he had been wishing to kiss (indeed) a creeping wasp in winter, or a crab, or a furr'd and feeler'd moth. He had believed till that instant that he hated her, but to hate a strong enemy, full of resource and will, is to continue to admire, after a fashion, especially if what you hate you also find beautiful. Now, rather than a girl who made mischief from an excess of spirit, a wicked lively freedom, it seemed he saw a being miserably compelled, venomous and yet helpless; self-stung, self-poisoned, unequal to the catastrophes she caused.
Quoted on August 12, 2017
[On Americans, drinking] Yet here it was regular, cleanly-dressed citizens--he would have said sober citizens -- who were casting off their daylight selves upon the sulphurous apron of the fire, and drinking, not to be convivial, not to take off the cold edge of the night, but to dissolve as much of themselves as spirits would eat away.
Quoted on August 12, 2017