Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars
Mr. Godwin writes about his ma with affection and careful detail. Gentle humor is ever-present ... His book teems with rare and recherché words...(sometimes, perhaps, too often) ... Beautiful ... Mr. Godwin’s unraveling marriage offers a pungent (and often delicious) counterpoint to the ebbing of his mother’s life.
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This is an exceptional memoir, its stories told with such immediacy that the reader lives Godwin’s days with him, constantly on the lookout for the absurdities and anomalies that entertain him, always mindful of partings and wanderings in 'hostile environments' ... Godwin chronicles the excruciating steps of marital break-up with carefully judged poignancy. Keeping misery at bay, eschewing sentimentality and self-pity, he fills his book with fluent and erudite asides on anthropology, literature, biology and history ... Few people have described better the anguish of separation, the constant sense of not belonging, the quest for a centre that might hold. He writes humorously; but there is no mistaking the pain.
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Godwin operates, a rootless Conradian exile of former empire, from a place of loss ... An attempt at bridging the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness, it’s a search-and-not-destroy mission to dissolve entrenched inhibitions, moral ambiguities, and the numbness of survivor’s guilt.
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