The Vulnerables
Sigrid Nunez
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Vulnerables
Sigrid Nunez
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception.
Slim, ruminative, by turns wry and witty, with a reluctantly aging, exceedingly well-read, writer-narrator very like Sigrid Nunez herself, all three novels are marked by their author’s formidable intelligence, refusal of simple answers or reductive pieties, and eccentric blend of profundity and playfulness. All three are stuffed with quotations from philosophers, poets, and novelists, meditate on the writer’s calling and the value of writing in an increasingly commercial world, and address suffering, disappointment, and loss with honesty and humor.
Little explosions of pathos detonate periodically through this story — their power even more impressive for the way Nunez repeatedly lulls us into the comfort of her wry, ruminative voice.
A novel of uneven intimacies, of, perhaps, unrequited love.
With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life. There are those who will lazily call this a pandemic novel but it’s so much more than that.
Such is Nunez’s great talent: she can make us care about anything.
Deeply observant.
She is driven by questions about what kind of literary work best suits our times, which leads to reflections on the conflicting views of a multitude of her favorite writers.
But the pandemic’s influence extends even deeper into the novel’s form. Its prose exhibits a static quality—as if the writing itself is trapped inside, unable to leave the house or go about its business.
Who better to write a 'pandemic book' than the godmother of contemplating empathy and connection?.
Nunez adroitly turns each of the characters...into the titular vulnerables, confronting exposure to illness, isolation, rejection, homelessness, and death.
Calling on a vast store of memories lived, read, and written about, the narrator is serious and silly, optimistic and devastating, lighting readers’ way through a dark and disconnected time, joyfully..
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez could be marketed as a pandemic novel. But that would be selling it short. For The Vulnerables is a profound novel of ideas that explores grief, aging, friendships, writing, literature, and death. This exquisite work defines and redefines the very notion of a pandemic novel through its playful, yet meditative, unconventional form and content..
...classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer’s block.
Nunez skillfully confuses the narrative—is it fiction or autobiography or both?—and confronts many issues, from mental illness to political chaos to vaccine denial.
Despite the grimness of the setting—the novel itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful; there is, it seems, a reason to go on. Sharp—and surprisingly tender..
Funny and thoughtful.