Damage

Warning: the author includes information about how this story came about in the first few pages of the book and inadvertently reveals something that the reader should come across when they are intended to in the actual story. Don’t read that introduction. Skip it and go straight to the start of the book. Trust me. I read this for the first time in my 20’s, back in the 90’s, and while I liked the book, I didn’t truly appreciate all the little yet importante things Hart included in such a short book. There’s a lot to dissect here. Themes of obsession, manipulation, infidelity, selfishness, carelessness with the hearts of others, sexual assault, gender roles, marriage without romantic love or true sexual desire. There are many things to think about. I love that the MC was the narrator as he inadvertently reveals a lot of his personality in his thoughts and actions. The denouement while not a complete surprise, the reader knows things will not end well, is still brutal and heartbreaking. The selfishness, the thoughtlessness displayed by the narrator and his accomplice, his manipulator, knows no bounds.

This novel is a swift-moving, sharp, concise, and brilliantly written tragedy of less than 200 pages.A prominent doctor/ politician who has led a contented but passionless life, becomes obsessed with his son's fiancee at a glance. They enter into a passionate affair that results in sorrow, estrangement, and death for those involved with them. Their encounters are all mindless and purely physical, and revolve around Bondage. Although this book was gripping, I found it more a story of lust and fetishism than love- and it was hard for me to understand how someone would throw away his career and family for this. Still, this book is an excellent piece of literature.

it was ok, the movie on Netflix (Obsession) was better at conveying the storyline.

I had seen the film, and something about it lingered. The situation of the story, the acting, all conveyed with incredible depth that I wondered if it was based on a novel, which, to my delight, I found it was, thus immediately placed an order for the book, along with several other available novels, "Sin," and "The Stillest Day," by the author, Josephine Hart. Hart's writing is smart, sharp, and focused, which I appreciate. There's a keen sense the author wished to examine this type of situation in a novel, whether sparked by some personal experience, or through an alternate source of inspiration, and that is accomplished. The prose is poetic as only what matters to tell this story is on the page. A fine read, conveying a kind of understanding of how rare it really is to cross paths with someone who ignites, and how common it really is to simply settle, thinking that "this must be all there is." But, this is, and is not, a love story. For the unnamed narrator, one reader might see erotic obsession, while another, including the narrator, sees the meeting of the woman who will undo his life, as he knows it, as becoming alive. To him, it is an awakening from the sleep that has been his life, until the spark comes. And what **is** erotic obsession, anyhow? Is there such a thing as "star-crossed lovers?" No matter. The writing style and story conveyed impressed me and I'm not easily impressed. It's a keeper for my library shelf, and I plan to use sections in lessons in my fiction workshop classes.

Love conquers and kills. But is hard to see how anyone could risk it all for the stony faced Anna.

The author herself seemed to consider this a love story, but it's a heartbreakingly stark and lean one at that. With an unapologetically detached, yet strikingly honest narrator, the reader is drawn into the tragic story of a man obsessed with a life he's destined never to have, all the while obliterating the very life that he's dispassionately built. In many ways, reading Damage was like driving past an undeniably fatal car accident and nevertheless having to look on in horror. Perhaps I will come back and read this novel again and view it through a different lens. Perhaps not.

This intense, disturbing short novel is essentially a study of what can happen when passion enters lives that heretofore have been conventional, pleasant, and superficial. Middle-aged, well-to-do Stephen Fleming, married to the beautiful Ingrid with two grown children, Sally and Martyn, is a physician who almost effortlessly becomes a Member of Parliament and is a government official. He is the very epitome of English respectability. The brilliance of this book lies in the ability of the author to capture the stark differences, the many subtleties, between a life lived that maintains appearances and meets expectations and one where the connection with what one does or who one is with is so all-consuming and fulfilling that anything that interferes is shoved aside and becomes irrelevant. To say that people can be hurt beyond belief when such a sudden transformation occurs is sheer understatement. And so it is when Stephen first meets his son's girlfriend Anna Barton, an enigmatic, aloof, and dark beauty, who simply mesmerizes Stephen. Part of Anna's appeal is her combination of toughness and vulnerability; she admits that she is "damaged" and could harm those who pursue her. The only question in this story is will Stephen be able to pull out of a nosedive to total self-destruction? Does a passionate existence justify ripping apart a life and the lives of those close by? This book is simply gripping - almost too much so. One is almost afraid to find out if Stephen can possibly deal with the elusive and intoxicating Anna.

Damage by Josephine Hart, is a novel with a shocking plot. It is essentially about what happens when an off guard moment of sexual invitation by body language, hits a space in the life of a middle aged man who is living a predictable and boring life. He is warned that a damaged person is dangerous. But he takes no notice, and predictably, falls hook, line and sinker. This is the set up of the plot, and we watch him as he sinks to the bottom with no moral compass or apparent care for those he will hurt. He does care. But he sails close to the wind, and is driven by obsession, until there really is no way to return to any form of normal life. As Hart unfolds every undesirable action, each comes as a shock to the reader, until the reader is fully convinced that only some form of disaster must be the consequence. This propels the reader to the end. Even then it is not predictable. This novel is written with simplicity and is easy to read. It carries no excess of words, description or dialogue tags. But there is no doubt as to who is speaking to whom, or who looks like what. The characters are clear, and the dialogue is quite brilliant. The main strength of this novel, is its ability to evoke huge emotion in the reader, which makes it brilliant for discussion in Book Groups, as it affects each reader in different ways. Hart seems to have a deep understanding of her main characters, one of whom was severely damaged in childhood, which is alluded to at the beginning. We are intrigue and shocked as this aspect of the plot unfolds. The last thing I would say, is that it is important for the reader to detach personally while discussing this novel, as it can draw some in very deeply. So objectivity is the key. But it is a novel well worth reading.

Em 1990, Josephine Hart , uma irlandesa, lançou o livro Damage ( no Brasil se chamaria Perdas e Danos) mas somente um ano depois ele seria distribuído em todas as livrarias do país e vendido para outros locais , sendo traduzido para 26 idiomas. A moça irlandesa que ao se mudar para Londres passou a a participar de grupos de escritores e ser editora de uma grande empresa, agora despontava como uma imensa revelação. Um ano mais tarde seu livro viraria filme com um elenco de rostos do momento: Jeremy Irons e Juliette Binoche estavam entre eles. O livro tão polêmico quanto o filme contava a história de um renomado médico que estava entrando para carreira política mas se via envolvido com a futura esposa de seu filho mais velho. O filme ficou semanas ( até meses) em cartaz no mundo todo e tinha cenas bem animadas da traição na história. A autora faleceu em 2011, deixando mais 5 obras publicadas. Recentemente a Netflix lançou a série Desejo Obsessivo. Sou completamente apaixonada por essa história de desejo proibido.

This is a short and fascinating story. Well worth the read.

This novel investigates the effect of the entry of a "damaged" person into a normal bourgeois family. It leads to a disaster which, though predictable, is horrifying all the same. The atmosphere of smug affluent middle-class British life is obvious from the start, well captured by the family's language and expressed values. It is clear that the author knows such people, their talk and thinking. The reader is led into their private lives and concerns in a thoroughly convincing description. The strength and interest of the novel lies in the description of a contrasting type of existence, observed by a life-experienced narrator able to understand the contradictions involved. This is an astonishing contribution, incidentally by a female author, to one's understanding of situations becoming more common in Western societies: "Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive" is the conclusion the author arrives at. It will reverberate in the reader's memory.

Tragico ed imprevisto