Reading Sessions with Elad Bar-Noy

Three reading sessions at Beit Ariela: Through the novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, we will examine questions about loss, parenthood, childhood, and memory, and also discuss motherhood, crows, Ted Hughes, different approaches to grief, and the connection between grief and imagination.

In Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter’s short and mesmerizing debut novel, a father and his two sons try to go on living after the sudden death of the mother of the family. The story begins with a knock on the door, when an uninvited guest enters the mourners’ London flat—a huge crow: a literary genius, sharp-tongued, a potential rapper, funny, arrogant, and insolent, who informs the family that he will stay until they no longer need him. A crow who insists on bringing the obscene, filthy, life-filled energy that loss brings with it. A crow who insists on picking at the family’s wounds again and again. He throws the children’s orphanhood and the father’s widowhood in their faces, demanding that they confront their loss in a variety of creative and cruel ways. He opposes polite caution and the reverent, sacred attitude toward death.

The story is told in three voices—the father, the sons, and the crow—and combines prose, drama, and poetry, shifting between registers and styles, juggling rap, fairy tales, myths, wordplay, and gibberish. Although the novel’s adaptations for film and stage achieved tremendous success in Britain, the United States, and Europe, it passed under the radar here, despite Oded Wolkstein’s virtuoso translation. In this book club, which will take place over three sessions, we will offer a reading of one of the most extraordinary books ever written. Through it, we will examine questions about loss, parenthood, childhood, and memory, and also discuss motherhood, crows, Ted Hughes, different approaches to grief, and the connection between grief and imagination. These will be intimate sessions devoted to a text that is funny and sad, dark and strange, deeply personal and deeply literary.

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