Book review: Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd
Rating: 5 out of 5
“Life, photography, love, epic”
It took me a while to stop reading this as an auto-biography and read it as a novel. The style is incredibly convincing and I had to stop myself from looking up events mentioned and remember that it’s part of a fictional narrative. A fascinating story about a character that felt real, felt like someone I was getting to know, felt like someone I wanted to know more about.
A Christmas gift from a friend who rated it as her favourite novel of 2017.
Highlighted passages:
I was thinking about the mistakes we all make - or rather the concept of a ‘mistake’. It’s something that can only be realised in hindsight - big mistake or a small one.
What is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen - there’s nothing we can do about them
Your personal history of death teaches you what’s important, what makes it actually worth being alive - sentient and feeling
Originally posted to my Goodreads account