Sight is narrated by a nameless young woman who, pregnant with her second child, meditates on her mother’s death and its aftermath, her relationship with her psychoanalyst grandmother, and how difficult it was to decide to have her first baby. The narrative brushes back and forth in time, bringing unexpected connections to the surface.

This is an assured debut, exploring themes of self, identity and parenthood

Source Netgalley (in the hope of an honest review)

This is the first of a series that I shall entitle ‘Throwback Thursday’. I will use these reviews to catch up on un-reviewed ARCS. This review was written a year ago and has been languishing on my hard drive ever since. So, I thought that I would post it now.

This book centres on a woman who is contemplating: motherhood; and her memories of her mother and grandmother. Her mother seems to be ill, weak and mostly absent. On the other hand, her grandmother seems ever present and dominant. The narrative floats between; the far past of her childhood, the close past of the time before her first pregnancy, and the period when the story is being told.

This book is an interesting exploration of the relationships between women. It explores issues around: motherhood; parenting; the expectations that we place on each other; and the way that our experiences of childhood shape our expectations of parenthood, both; good, and bad.

Nevertheless, this is a very literary novel. There is very little plot and it is simply the, almost stream of conscious style, narration of the inner thoughts of the protagonist. If you like books that have a linear, action packed plot, then, maybe, this book is not for you. However, if you like books that explore human experience and human relationships; and if you enjoy lyrical, thoughtful writing then this novel is for you.

Poetic and extremely visceral writing. Occasionally the sentences felt repetitive, using multiple metaphors to illustrate the same thing, but an accomplished debut none-the-less.

I don’t quite know how I feel about this book or how to describe it. The narrative voice was compelling and realistic which is why I gave it 4/5 stars. I really got to know and understand her fears and motivations and that kind of connnection is what makes novel for me. However, the structure was often odd and off putting and the switching between topics and/or time periods could be jarring - although on occasions I found that this worked. Overall, I wouldn’t say I enjoyed this book, but I definitely felt like I got something from it, so I will be reading anything this author releases in the future.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to love this much more than I ultimately did. It didn't reflect my own experiences of loss and grief, which made it difficult to engage with. I think it would feel more comfortable if it was shorter, condensed into a short story.

The plot of 'Sight', follows the narrator discussing her experience of new motherhood, and her experience of the death of her mother/grandmother.

The book is well written, although it feels almost like a lengthened short story, and almost as if the author is trying just a little too hard. Greengrass has written short stories before and so this could be the issue. The meditations on grief in here almost save the entire thing and alone would be just perfect.

This being said, the book was listed in the woman's prize for fiction. Therefore, it's plot has drawn attention and is to some peoples' taste.

Overall, 2/5 stars.

This title was reviewed on Splice on September 20, 2018: https://thisissplice.co.uk/2018/09/10/the-hidden-made-manifest-jessie-greengrass-sight.

This is an interesting and engaging debut novel. Jumping back and forth in time from the present, where the narrator reflects on her pregnancy, and incidents form the past that illuminate her relationships with her mother and grandmother. Into this the author weaves details about how notable scientific discoveries were made, and these provide insight or have resonance with the narrator's situation. Some of the contemplative passages work better than others.

Sadly, this book just wasn’t for me. I found the writing tedious and clumpy and the lack of plot meant I found it really difficult to get into.
That being said, I can see why people would love this book.

A deeply introspective novel following an unnamed narrator as she reflects upon her first pregnancy, her mother’s death, her grandmother, what it means to be a parent and what it means to grow from childhood into adulthood.

The narrative shifts between these examinations, and is also interspersed with her explaining scientific insights from Wilhelm Röntgen (X-rays), Freud etc each of which relate to her current musings. At first this may seem disjointed but they are relevant.

This is a deeply introspective, navel gazing novel with no obvious story and the main conflict being the narrator own anxieties. This anxiety is prevalent throughout and the writing style itself, jumping back and forth, running on into obsessive thoughts made me quite anxious while reading, so I would say that the portrayal was accurate of the way an anxious brain overworks itself.

The pace is slow and I was somewhat impatient, perhaps a reflection of the narrator down anxiety and impatience while pregnant. At times I did find myself skimming. The scientific sections, while interesting, felt overly long and took me out of what is already a slow burning story. I feel that they could have been worked in with smoother transitions.

Despite it’s flaws this is a novel I found myself thinking about throughout my day, and is a book that seems to grow in strength when given some time to breathe and reflect.

Actual review 2.5 stars

“Growing up, I said, is a solitary process of disentanglement from those who made us and the reality of it cannot be avoided but only, perhaps, deferred”

Hmmm this book wasn't for me at all! now don't get me wrong there was some things about this book I enjoyed and I highlighted a lot of sections that spoke to me while reading this on my Kindle, however for me most of this book was a drag.

This is a very hard book to describe, it's more like a stream of consciousnesses about motherhood and we get to view motherhood through our unnamed narrator and her relationships with her mother, grandmother, daughter and unborn child. I felt there was a rawness and honesty in this book that I appreciated about being a mother and not knowing whether having kids is the right thing to do or even if you want them and how your body is no longer yours through pregnancy, it was so refreshing to see these themes explored, there is also an honesty when dealing with death and parental relationships I admired. However this book is scattered with facts about science ect with the man who discovered the x-ray being spoke about in depth a long with Freud and other and I just found these boring and it pulled me out of the story quite somewhat, these sections do tie in with the plot but I wish they hadn't been there.

In terns of writing this book was a total slog for me, it's literary fiction through and through and the language was at times hard going for me, this is a book that's need your full concentration or you will lose the thread of what's going on! I really don't enjoy this style of writing in a book but this is just personal preference and I know a lot of people will love it.

Overall this book was a bit of a dud for me, if I hadn't been reading it as part of the shortlist for the Woman's Prize or buddy reading it I wouldn't have kept reading it.

This is only the second book I have read from the shortlist but it's not one that will be on my list to win!.

Keep your eyes peeled for this showing up on the Man Booker longlist or shortlist because there is no doubt in my mind it will be there.

For some reason I just didn't get along with this. I totally see why others love it, but it just wasn't for me.

When is the best moment to have a child? Can you ever be ready to become a parent? And what does being a “good” parent actually mean? Jessie Greengrass unnamed narrator has to face these questions. Her husbands would like to have children, she is unsure. Her own childhood comes to her mind, her mother and grandmother, the way they treated her when she was a child, their complex family relationships and the fact that neither her mother not her grandmother is still alive. Yet, families and relationships are never easy, thus, Röntgen and Freud come to her mind as well as the beginnings of modern child birth.

Jessie Greengrass debut novel directly made it to the short list of the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an unexpected and uncommon combination of medical history, on the one hand, and a very personal reflection on the narrator’s own life and her feelings about motherhood. It starts with the narrator confronted with the essential question of becoming a mother or not when suddenly her rumination is interrupted by the report about Röntgen. Again and again, these two perspectives alternate which is interesting, but also difficult to follow since it often seems to lack a red thread. They are not isolated accounts, she cleverly combines the topics, e.g. her grandmother was a psychoanalyst like Freud, to give a reason for these interludes.

I can see why the novel made it to the Women’s Prize for Fiction’s short list. The topic tackles a core question of human beings and a deep wish we all share: knowing something for sure, being able to use medical precision for personal decisions and knowing that you do the right thing. Being able to look at something from a neutral and objective point of view, analysing and then making a decision – that’s what we often wish for, however, that’s not how life works.

Contradictory emotions, uncertainty – a lot of apparent opposites come together in the novel. Even though I found the narrator’s thoughts often easy to following and from a topical point of view most interesting, the novel as a whole did not completely convince me. I would have liked to stick with the narrator’s thoughts. Maybe it was all a bit too philosophical for my understanding.

I'm sure every new parent underestimates the overwhelming life-changing effects and the personal growth needed to cope, which is probably just as well when you eventually realise that your beloved offspring may be your hostage to fortune.
Childbirth, death, unconditional love and parental fears are the themes here, interwoven with stories of the insights brought about by scientific and medical research. Greengrass explores the physiological and psychological effects of parenthood, particularly from the female point of view – as a mother, daughter or grand-daughter, facing the challenges and responsibilities of bringing a new life into the world.

I read this book as part of its longlisting for the 2018 Women’s Prize, although I had been aware of the book from some early reviews and had expected it to make the longlist. I am not surprised to see it shortlisted.
“Sight” is the author’s debut novel, after a critically acclaimed book of short stories.
I can see and can understand that this book may not be to the taste of many readers – but I feel that what others do not like about the book is what I most enjoyed.
A FT review by Sam Leith described it (rather condescendingly in my view) as “a certain sort of literary novel in which not much happens” and with “musings … expressed in a mannered register with very little resemblance to the way the average 21st-century person talks”. In contrast I do not expect literary fiction to be plot heavy, a book which has a plot which can be spoiled is already flawed. Further I do not read literature to reproduce “say, like how the average girl, kind of talks?”
From unfavourable or neutral Goodreads reviewers, the book has drawn comparison both to Rachel Cusk and to W.G. Sebald whereas I regarded these comparisons as something that attracted me to the book and in both cases can see the links: perhaps a double aspect to the link in both cases, of Cusk her book on motherhood and her annihilated perspective style, of Sebald his weaving of historical fact into fiction and in a reference to East Anglian beaches), albeit the novel has style of its own.
The book’s premise is simple – our unnamed narrator, married to Johannes and with a young daughter is pregnant with their second child. She reflects on her relationships with her mother, grandmother and daughters (born and unborn), and on her past and future roles herself as daughter, granddaughter and mother and on the transition between these relationships as well as that from child to adolescence to adulthood.
The narrator is a voracious reader, and after the death of her mother, before marrying, she spends time in the Wellcome library (as did the author herself writing the book), searching through the medicine books there in the hope she “might find the fact which would make sense of my grown unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath”, her quest described as “I sought among so many books a way to understand myself by analogy, a pattern recognised in other lives which might be drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give it impetus, direction”
This search seems to give her book a shape and pattern – the book being effectively rearranged in three parts – each concentrating on a particular relationship (respectively her mother, her psychoanalyst grandmother and her unborn daughter) and on a scientific figure (Wilhelm Röntgen – who discovered x-rays, Sigmund Freud and his children, John Hunter – a pioneering surgeon and collector, who helped introduce science back to the practice of medicine, his brother William and the anatomical sketches they commissioned from Jan van Rymsdyk, including of the dissection of a heavily pregnant woman with a full-term fetus).
Initially these sections can seem disjointed both within themselves (between the narrators reflections on her life and the scientific parts) and between the different sections – but gradually the reader uncovers the overlaps between these parts – the recurring themes of stripping apart, examination, of transitions, of boundaries, of the difference and interaction between the superficial and deep.
What I found particularly clever about this book was the way that its own subject matter becomes a meta-commentary on how the book itself is constructed, for example: the importance of the boundaries between the scientific historical sections and those sections with the narrators own musings; the way that layers are peeled back, examined and later reassembled – with the superficial in literary and anatomical terms contrasted with the deep; the importance of the “bare bones” of the novel’s structure overlaid with the interwoven complexity of the themes that run like blood vessels and nerves through it. Even the author’s idiosyncrasies of punctuation, with paragraphs and sentences ending with “ – “emphasises the idea of boundary and transition.
I found the descriptions of the process of bereavement moving. For example, on realising she cannot bleed her mother’s radiators, reset her boiler, or replace the salt in her dishwater: “This is where grief is found, in these suddenly unfilled cracks, these responsibilities – minute, habitual – which have lain elsewhere for years and which, having failed amongst grief’s greater broil to be reapportioned, are overlooked in favour of the more dramatic, until even the ordinary starts to crumble”
I also loved and particularly identified (albeit very imperfectly as the father some of the descriptions of pregnancy in the third part)
On welcoming a second child, while making the first still feel full loved “A reminder to our daughter that completion is elastic and she was enough even as we planned her augmentation”
Differences in her and Johannes view of pregnancy: “What I felt as a set of prohibitions and a physical incapacity, a slow-fast remaking of my own biology, was for him hardly more than anticipation, like waiting for Christmas to come”
Then how she describes her feelings and experiences watching a foetal heart trace, her meetings with consultants (her pregnancy from the day the baby was found breech “a series of waits on uncomfortable chairs” clutching “plastic cups from the water fountain in the corner of the waiting room”), undergoing an ECV, the early stages of induction “two days spent walking round and round the hospital car park in the hope labour might begin” and their contrast with its violent ending, and birth as “a ten hour lesson in topography”
Overall I found this an outstanding book.

In Sight, the narrator philosophises about motherhood, grief, and the past. Interwoven into this narrative are sections on the discovery of the x-ray, Freud’s development of psychoanalysis, and the history of anatomy, dissection and the birth of modern medicine. All of these appear to have little to do with motherhood, but are linked to the unknown and what cannot - on the surface - be seen, and the novel explores these in relation to the narrator’s experience of motherhood. It sounds bizarre, it kind of is, but I think it works.

The language is quite dense, there is no plot as such and the reader’s undivided attention is required. It reminded me of Solar Bones in the level of concentration needed to read it, and the way it follows the thoughts of the narrator (though Sight is much more ordered). I loved it at the beginning, then my interest waned a bit towards the middle and the end. I think my reading experience of this from a male perspective is probably quite different than that of female readers, which I’m really interested in. And I also wondered if reading this as a mother would be quite a different experience also.

I enjoyed the history sections, and I thought they were cleverly integrated into the story. It wasn’t always clear where the narrator was going with them, but I think we get there in the end. The part about her grief at the loss of her mother was heartbreaking and beautifully written. I felt quite sorry for Johannes, the patient and ever understanding partner who we get the occasional glimpse of, out of focus, hanging by the sidelines.
But I kept wondering throughout, where are her friends? Does anyone go to work?

Unfortunately, this wasn't one for me. I found the sections about the main character to be intriguing and beautifully written, however I found that the sections which focused on the scientific aspects of birth and psychoanalysis to be a little dry. This read more as academic research in parts over fiction although I can certainly see why this would appeal to a certain audience.

My memory of her, what remained, was like a memory of distance or the cold, intangible, unsymbolic , not sight nor sound, not touch, not taste, and my attempts at a description of it floundered like the description of music does in words, conveying nothing of its sound or substance.'

Jessie Greengrass's debut novel, Sight, comes compared to WG Sebald (a debt she acknowledges) and Rachel Cusk, a comparison made by those who both liked and disliked the book.

And I suspect that may be the issue: given Sebald is perhaps my favourite author of the last 30 years, and I read this immediately after finishing Cusk's magnificent Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy, my expectations were very high, and in practice I found this a significant disappointment.

I appreciated Greengrass's focus on interior thought rather than exterior action (Thomas Bernhard is the master of this - alongside Sebald, one my favourite authors), but again having read this shortly after Anita Brookner's Look At Me, this has been done much much better before.

Greengrass, it must be said writes magnficent sentences, but they often felt like phrases for their own sake. Why suffer from 'morning sickness' when one can experience 'the constant queasy ostinato over which rose exhaustion’s disharmonious cadence, a progression paused before the point of resolution, aching forwards.'

As MisterHobgoblin said in his review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2319284613) "the language is convoluted and when the reader unpicks the complexity to expose the meaning, there isn’t always very much to find."

The beautiful sentences worked well when discussing the historic figures (although even here the part about Sigmund and Anna Freud felt much weaker than the two surrounding stories, perhaps because it is more well trodden territory). For example, this description of when Röntgen took an x-ray picture of his wife's hand, which has been recorded in posterity as the first x-ray.

'Röntgen, who for weeks had been alone in his newly understood world, had sought with this image Bertha’s admittance to it, the making of the picture a gesture of both initiation and affection: the tenderness of her bones made visible to them both, confirmation of the life which had formed such extraordinary structures; but these things are a matter of interpretation. To Bertha, whose hands were solid, whose body unitary, who had not doubted those things that constituted her –her skin, her thoughts; the single object that was flesh housing mind –nor sought to understand them, it had the chilly, soily smell of tombs. —It is, she said —like seeing my own death —and she turned away, and refused to look again.'

But for the more personal parts of the novel, it diminished the power rendering the experience dull: I felt the emotions had been fitted to the sentence, rather than the opposite. The comparison to the rawer more visceral prose of authors like Patty Yumi Cottrell, Gwendoline Riley or Ariana Harwicz is not to Sight's credit. Indeed, for a short (200 page) novel, it took me longer than normal to read, as I had to put it down frequently to avoid falling asleep.

For a more generous take sees the reviews from Gumble's Yard (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2333857162) and Jonathan (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2320566791).

But for me, disappointing. 2.5 stars rounded down to 2 due to the high expectations I had.

I haven’t yet finished shadowing this year’s Wellcome Book Prize shortlist but I have already come across a novel which has very strong potential to be on next year’s longlist of books which engage in some aspect of health, illness or medicine. I enjoyed reading Jessie Greengrass’s collection of short stories An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It and her debut novel tells the story of an unnamed narrator who is expecting her second child with her partner, Johannes. During her pregnancy, she reflects on her relationships with her mother who she cared for during her terminal illness and her psychoanalyst grandmother known as “Doctor K”.

The pregnancy is planned, but the narrator has doubts about how having a second child will impact her relationship with her toddler daughter. She spends time in the Wellcome Library in London which specialises in books about medicine, researching Wilhelm Röntgen’s pioneering work on x-rays, Freud’s work on psychoanalysis and John Hunter’s surgical experiments, hoping that books will provide her with a better understanding of her changing body and self. The prose blends factual descriptions of these discoveries with the narrator’s meditations on her experiences of pregnancy and her family relationships, particularly her roles as a daughter, granddaughter and mother. This introduces some interesting reflections on transition in the context of parenting and grief, and the blurred boundary between truth and fiction. Although I have read a fair amount of novels which explore motherhood, pregnancy itself is rarely described in detail in literary fiction or is presented as problematic (Greengrass wrote an interesting article about this topic in the Guardian recently) and I really liked the way that Greengrass merged situations that many will find relatable with more stylised and introspective passages.

I was intrigued by the medical themes of ‘Sight’ but given some of the more philosophical elements, I had wondered if the prose might be too vague and fragmented for my personal taste. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how absorbing and gripping ‘Sight’ is in spite of the slow pace and relative absence of plot. It is a fairly short book even with the non-fiction elements to pad it out a bit, and the prose is elegantly crafted and tightly controlled, as those who enjoyed Greengrass’s short stories will already know. ‘Sight’ is on the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and I would be very happy to see it on the shortlist which will be announced tomorrow. Many thanks to John Murray Press for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Remarkable novel, which avoids solipsism with its digressions into Röntgen, Freud etc. In fact, they strengthen and broaden the (apparently) autobiographical narrative. Everyone should read it.