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    Breathe: A Novel
    Breathe: A Novel
    Breathe: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Breathe: A Novel

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES

    Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey.  At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own. 

    In vividly depicted scenes of escalating suspense, Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and selfless, is not enough to save him and that his death is beyond her comprehension.  A love that refuses to be surrendered at death—is this the blessing of a unique married love, or a curse that must be exorcized?

    Part intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life, BREATHE is an exploration of hauntedness rooted in the domesticity of marital love, as well as our determination both to be faithful to the beloved and to survive the trauma of loss.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 3, 2021
    ISBN9780063085503
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for Breathe

    3.5/5

    27 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Having recently lost my husband to cancer, I could not finish this book. I thought the story might be relatable and healing, like Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking". It was not.
    • 3/5
      Breathe, Joyce Carol Oates, author; Cassandra Campbell, narratorThis strange book appears to be an homage to the author’s own not too distant grievous loss, after a decade of marriage to her second husband. It is terribly difficult to read it, as it is relentless in its brutal descriptions of life and death with its grief and loneliness. When her husband and the love of Michaela’s life, Gerard McManus, falls ill unexpectedly, after only a dozen years of marriage, and he rapidly descends toward death, she either goes mad or simply lives in and imagines an alternate reality, most of the time. They had planned so many years and so many things to do together, but now, they never would have them. As man plans, G-d often laughs, as the saying goes. She was Gerard’s second wife, and she found herself wondering, as his mind wandered, from which wife was he seeking comfort? The novel is about unbearable loss, the stages of grief and loneliness, and our ability or inability to cope with our lives when we are faced with devastating trauma and hopeless prospects. Does Michaela feel guilty for being alive as Gerard lays dying? Can she bear the thought of his absence from her life? Is she a victim who joins her husband in death after attempting to sacrifice everything to save him, or does she become the lone survivor, finally facing her loss and beginning a new chapter in her life? She is, after all, still young. I am not sure the reader will be able to decide which, as Oates paints alternate realities on almost every page. This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read, as well as the most intuitive into our innermost thoughts. However, if the reader can’t get past the gross demon gods, the nightmares, the odd characters, the barbaric legends, the gory descriptions of a life that seems irreparable so that hospice care and/or psychological intervention will be necessary for all the living and the dying, I advise the reader to pass it by. One needs a high tolerance for aberrant behavior and alternate worlds in order to appreciate this novel, for Oates imagination has really explored the outer edges of our hopeless existence this time. We witness Michaela as she suffers from a grief too large to bear as her despair overcomes her, as her husband’s illness defeats him, as she refuses to eat, grows faint, harms herself without knowing, and cannot breathe, although she keeps begging Gerard to continue to breathe. She too, hallucinates and does not accept her reality. It is a rapid descent into madness as she grows unable to function in the real world and all of her hopes and dreams vanish.There are no redeeming features. Nurses and medical personnel are indifferent, friends are false, despair and hopelessness are the only reality for Michaela and thus, also for the reader. There is no place to turn for real comfort, for there is no cure for what she or Gerard have to endure on their own.The descriptions of loss are authentic, however, though they are almost too visceral. The description of relationships is right on the money as well, with one partner always making sacrifices for the other who often does not wholly appreciate them, with the devastating effects of tragedy on all of us. Our own re-examination of our relationships, in deep detail, is very common when devastating illness strikes or when tragedy of any kind occurs. It requires a readjustment of our lives in order to deal with the suffering to come. Do we not demand that the victim continue to breathe for our own sake, and not theirs, always, so we get to keep them as long as we can, regardless of how they suffer, even as they become a shell of a human being with no lifelike qualities except for the breath of air a machine can provide? It is very disturbing as death and loneliness overwhelm the characters. Often, I found it hard to discern which of the narratives was real and which was imaginary, as Micaela’s life also seemed to travel down the road of unreality.The book seemed overly preoccupied, perhaps to the point of obsession, with the sexual references to some Native American gods and goddesses, but especially when referring to Skli and Ishtikini. Blood, suffering, tumors, metastases, mental problems were so front and center it was difficult to keep reading without becoming depressed myself, yet it was written so well, I could not give it less than a three stars. However, At one point when the author lists television programs that Gerard prefers, they are all left-wing, which unnecessarily gave away her own personal political views. In addition, why were several themes so repetitious. It became distracting. The reader will wonder if the end scene is a reference to Oates’ description of Orpheus as he attempts to bring Eurydice back to life, hinting therefore that Michaela succumbs when “Gerard” turns to look back, or will the reader believe that because the story of Orpheus is truly a legend, her survival is meant to be the real ending?
    • 1/5
      I almost have to say that I hated it more than 1 star could ever convey. Not because it was badly written but because Gerald's slow death was agonizing to read about. I ask you...who wants to read about all the excruciating details about a loved one dying? I caught myself breathing with Gerald as he breathed what could have been his last breath, and it was almost a relief when it finally was. I truly understood Michaela's love and devotion to begin with, but the story was beyond difficult. I guess that was probably the whole point of the title. Another thing that I started to hate Michaela for was that she refuses the most minute extensions of any support. I believe this one may actually give me more nightmares than any of the horror/paranormal genre books I read ever could.
    • 4/5
      As a long-time fan of Oates, I eagerly await the release of her works. "Breathe" is a harrowing tale of grief. One review aptly described it as a "fever dream" of a novel. The author's blending of reality with staggering disorientation was a bit difficult to navigate in spots. Still, I found the book enthralling from its opening passage to its stunning ending. It wasn't my favorite work by Oates, but the bar is always set incredibly high when I open one of her masterful works.
    • 3/5
      This is a book in which you need to be in the right frame of mind, and I wasn’t. The story of a woman failing to come to terms with the death of her husband is powerful and satisfying, but perhaps hit a little too close to home for me. She wills him to breathe and as he struggles to deal with pneumonia, lung cancer and tumor in the urethra. But halfway through the book, he dies and she struggles with accepting that statues of southwestern native gods that decorate their rented home terrorize her. They and other characters of Greek myths infest her nightmares. It is a raw and painful story.
    • 5/5
      A chilling, terrifying story of the impact of grief. There were times I truly couldn’t breathe. An apt title for a breathtaking novel. Most highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Breathe is another example of Joyce Carol Oates creating a difficult yet impactful book around what many may see as too raw and too disturbing. This novel, more than possibly any of her previous work, will depend heavily on how a reader approaches such a work rather than how well Oates wrote the book.Maybe I should explain. I will start with the phrase "I enjoyed the book." When one reads a disturbing book the enjoyment is not so much savoring every word as one might do with many novels. It is more like running a marathon, there is a lot of discomfort during the run but the enjoyment is in what that discomfort does for you and in reflecting n that experience. Some people don't run marathons specifically for that reason, they want their exercise to be enjoyable throughout even if the resulting enjoyment might be a bit less. Maybe a nice long walk taking in the scenery, less discomfort but also a smaller payoff. Some people enjoy both, and in the case of reading that would mean enjoying the book that is uncomfortable while reading as well as the ones that are light and comfortable throughout.The details in this book are shocking at first. Not because any of us who have experienced similar grief and similar deaths of loved ones don't recognize them but because we usually don't reflect on them. We don't find the words to describe them which means we don't have to think about them in any detail. Oates makes us face these and think about them. If you've experienced similar grief, and most of us as we age have experienced more than one earth-shattering loss or trauma, will reflect on our own past as well as experience Michaela's loss and her path through, one hopes, her grief.It is in taking her journey with her that we have a couple of options, and they reflect how the reader approaches other people's grief processes. We can feel for her, we can believe that we would not do certain things she does, but we walk with her and empathize as best we can. Or, like some will do, we can judge her, judge how she grieves, and rather than empathize we become judge and jury about how one is supposed to grieve. That is unfortunate since we all grieve differently. In fact, we grieve differently over the course of our lives when confronted with similar losses. So to prefer judging to empathizing, albeit while hoping we wouldn't do some of the same things, says a lot more about the reader than the book or even about the character of Michaela.I would recommend this to readers who don't mind being uncomfortable while reading about a character's struggles as long as none of the pain and anguish is gratuitous, and none here is. I would also recommend to those who take difficult books to heart to look more closely at themselves and not simply judge themselves better than the character so reflection isn't needed. Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.