Melanie's Reviews > Clear

“The film looks deceptively small, but in character it's big and strong and complex. Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination.”

~~ Vincent Canby’s review of “The Piano” by Jane Campion for the NYTimes

Everything in “Clear” reminded me of the movie “The Piano”. It is as stark as it is lush. It is as complex as it is self-evident. It is as wide-angled as it is microscopic.

What Carys Davies does here with literary fiction is very much akin to what Jane Campion achieved visually with her cinematic masterpiece: a most delicate and insanely elegant rendering of primeval forces. The sea. The weather. The birds. Desire. Language. Connectedness.

The vaster wilds and the inner voices.

A trembling, near perfect book that is as much about the intricacies of forlorn languages than it is about the primitive beauty that is only found in the absence of words.

Words can say so much, yet life burns oh so brightly right between the lines.

By zooming in and out, with bursts of chapters that seesaw from the immensity and cruelty of the natural world to the meaning-making shifts of the human heart, Carys Davies paints an indelible picture that will burn its way into your core memories.

We had our genius Irish female writers.

We now have a genius Welsh who leaps alongside them, running with the wolves.