Customer Reviews

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(2)
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And some (cynics, prudes, realists; people who like their brilliance consistent & unmarred) may find the prose so purple as to warrant UV-protection. And, of course, they're right -- up to a point. For there's certainly no shortage of examples they can cite to send up its extravagance ("When my eyes float around the room like two ships lost on the sea, I know the exact measurements of my captivity.").

But in this (admittedly) florid little book are moments of such delirious intensity! Here is Love's catalogue, all of its wild oscillations (desire & more desire, plenitude & lack, the ecstasy of self-transcendence and the terror of self-dissolution), and turns of phrase to turn your head around: "I am over-run, jungled in my bed, I am infested with a menagerie of desires..." Or this: "There is no room for pity, of anything. In a bleeding heart I should find only exhilaration in the richness of the red."

"By Grand Central..." reads not like the diary of an affair calmly recollected and retold (intensely autobiographical, the book has its origins in the real-life love affair between Smart and poet George Barker) but rather one howled and sung by nerve-endings still raw from love-rub. And if your ears can withstand the howls, the song -- at times -- rises up into registers of beauty you've never heard before.

And for everyone else? There's always Hemingway.

This is a beautifully brilliant book -- more of an extended prose poem than a novella. While we flow along with Smart on the torrents of this not-quite-unrequited relationship with poet Barker, we learn that although love may be wrenching, it is certainly worth it, hence the expression: it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Smart expresses that it worth it to be passionate about love and to live life in love with everything. It may be painful at times, but the pleasure can be excruciatingly beautiful. In Smart's own words are words to live by: "Love all things in all ways, but never less than total." Reading Grand Central is to experience the anguish and the splendor of a love relationship.

Never before have I read a book that captures the desperation of love so eloquently. Elizabeth Smart is able to avoke such vivid images of pain that this novel left me breathless. The whole book is one major work of lyrical prose put together so magnificently that I simply had to read the whole thing out loud.

I read this wonderful book 4 summers ago, (and still re-read it now and then)while vacationing in the Georgian Bay Islands, north of Toronto, Ontario, not far from where Elizabeth Smart originated from. From the first page, I was entwined with the lyrical prose and the all too real characters. I found myself re-living/remembering a form of love so intense, so passionate and all consuming...but to have it all encapsulated in this little gem of a book, so rich in colorful prose form, only illuminated something so rare and precious, that I for one, was once fortunate to have had in my lifetime. If you are one of the few that has ever experienced this form of love, you will find yourself re-living a part of yourself that you may have forgotten about...Or, if you're one of the many that has yet to experience that degree of powerful, yet uncontrollable, most ardent passion (that many believe only happens in the movies)...then read this unique book and experience first-hand the gut wrenching, heart stopping delirium of love, in it's most sincere, magical, sometimes painful, yet always, primal form.

I saw this on my dad's bookshelf and fell in love with the title. It wasn't long since I'd been studying Eliot and the bathos (not to mention religious reference) in the title reminded me of him.

The book contains plenty of such moments - the police interview being my favourite. The language is rich and at times almost sickly (if it was much longer it could well become unbearable)

Criticising this book as overwrought and self indulgent is to miss the point. It's about a someone who is comletely distraut and obsessed about the events of there life. Everything in the world becomes her sorrow - literature, religion, history and nature are all made to reflect her state of mind. It's what all bad teenage poetry is aspiring too.

Overall it feels slightly flawed but don't let that put you off reading it; flawed books are often more interesting than near perfect ones. It may be over the top but it's certainly unusual and I enjoyed reading it.

I read this wonderful book 4 summers ago, (and still re-read it now and then)while vacationing in the Georgian Bay Islands, north of Toronto, Ontario, not far from where Elizabeth Smart originated from. From the first page, I was entwined with the lyrical prose and the all too real characters. I found myself re-living/remembering a form of love so intense, so passionate and all consuming...but to have it all encapsulated in this little gem of a book, so rich in colorful prose form, only illuminated something so rare and precious, that I for one, was once fortunate to have had in my lifetime. If you are one of the few that has ever experienced this form of love, you will find yourself re-living a part of yourself that you may have forgotten about...Or, if you're one of the many that has yet to experience that degree of powerful, yet uncontrollable, most ardent passion (that many believe only happens in the movies)...then read this unique book and experience first-hand the gut wrenching, heart stopping delirium of love, in it's most sincere, magical, sometimes painful, yet always, primal form.

Product arrived timely and was exactly as described. What more can one ask for?

This book is painfully, wretchedly, horribly bad. There's a reason this book is not commonly hailed as a classic by academia. There is a difference between using prose-poetry form as a method to subvert the traditional intentions and expectations of poetic form and writing in such a convoluted manner that one's words and images become a "code," only decipherable by readers who believe they've experienced just as nasty a relationship as the author and can insert whatever necessary information they think they need to. There is absolutely nothing vaguely interesting about the author's intentions or thoughts (so far as one can tell), and there is nothing remotely skillful about the style in which the text is constructed. The only use for this text is as an example to university literature and creative writing students of "what not to do." The highpoint, however, is that the metaphors and images are so over-done, so bad, so downright ludicrous that the whole text becomes really, really funny. That, however, was not Smart's goal, one would suspect. Don't spend your money on this text; go buy prose poetry by an author whose name you've heard before. There's a reason you've heard *that* name and not Elizabeth Smart.

This book, as anyone well read enough to catch the link between the title and the line in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is made aware, is heavily dependent upon other poets and writers for its content and effect. In short, it's not very original. Indeed, the last page in the book contains two concluding allusions to a poem by Ezra Pound. I suppose Ms. Smart either hoped nobody would notice them; or, if they did, to consider her ever so clever for conjoining her work with Mr. Pound's. -Either way, one doesn't get the feel that one is reading anything moving or original here.

In lieu of this derivative and misguided work, I would recommend the masterwork of a novella that Ms. Smart is obviously trying to emulate-Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. This book isn't really a work of art, but as the narrator herself puts is, "The noise of my inside seas."----And don't call her Ishmael.