Paradise by A.L. Kennedy

Paradise Reviews

• 
  Carol

  Extremely dark, and I remember being dissatisfied with the ending. However, the writing absolutely blew me away. I read a lot of fiction, and very little electrifies me the way this book did.
• 
  tish

  The first chapter of Paradise begins with Hannah, our narrator, in a hotel with no knowledge of why she's there, where she's going or where she's been. Pretty quickly you realize that she's an alcoholic, and we are brought up to date by memories and flashbacks to discover that in the timeline of the novel that first chapter falls at the midpoint. I was a little discombobulated at first by the structure, but as I got to know Hannah it fit perfectly. Memories are discovered and confessed by the most unlikely connections, so what seems like a really funny story may become the most horrifying or heartbreaking thing you've ever heard. If Hannah is off balance, then so are you, and what makes Kenendy's writing great is her ablity to take this woman, who you would never want to know at all, let alone be friends with, and make her so real that she feels a little like you. I've been thinking about this novel since I finished reading it, and Kennedy's images are so perfect and clear that the book just runs like a movie in my head. It still breaks my heart, and makes me laugh, and fills me with a longing that I think is Hannah's.
• 
  Jim Elkins

  A Memorable Book, Not Reviewed
  
  On the confessional trauma scale, definitely a four-star book. Oh my God is this unpleasant. Smeary, spongy, oily, gritty: an inventory of the book's contents is like an inventory of a pool of fresh vomit.
  
  I wrote that in 2010, when I'd just started taking notes on books. I'm sorry, looking back on these sparse sentences in 2020, that I did not write a longer review. This book, more than many others I've read in the last year, has really stayed with me. Its flaws run deep--is depends at every moment on outdoing other novelists in the pursuit of grime and the fine points of wallowing--but it is very strong. Sometimes sticking in mind is the only essential quality.
• 
  Kathrin Passig

  2023, zehn Jahre nach der Lektüre: Warum habe ich dazu eigentlich damals nichts geschrieben? Es ist ein Buch, das ich oft (meines Wissens erfolglos) empfohlen habe und an das ich oft denke, vor allem an den sehr guten Anfang. Um rauszufinden, warum ich keine fünf Sterne vergeben habe, müsste ich es noch mal lesen. Vielleicht mache ich das.
• 
  Allison Floyd

  GUPTGed at page 18 (pathetic, I know)! Hey, man, if I wanted to trawl the minutiae of the mind of a hair-splitting alcoholic, I would just think.
• 
  Lucy

  I really did enjoy this, but I am amazed by people describing it as 'a short book.' It didn't seem that way to me! It felt like really heavy going, that I could only take in a little bit it a time, so it took me ages to read it, wincing all the way. It felt very real, very frightening and very sad. I have a cousin who has succumbed to alcoholism, and this all rings very true. There was black humour, of course there was, and moments, many, of great poignancy and tenderness. But overall it was pretty bleak, and left me with nightmares. A book with funny, clever and convincing writing .. but no hope to offer, none at all.
• 
  Jonas Nielsen

  Yeah.. cool. Liked it. Weird ending. Extremely well written. Loved the prose.
• 
  Penelly

  I'm so glad I decided to hunt down some female Scottish authors. Because I found this novel. I absolutely loved this. It's not long but I read it slowly because I wanted to savour the writing. Breathtaking. It's a story about Hannah Luckcraft, an alcoholic woman whose search for the next drink, whose ups and downs, are compelling, saddening and believable. The insights into addiction are quite remarkable. The utter despair is tempered by a beautifully dark sense of humour and some of the most amazing observations about humanity I have read in a long time.
• 
  Carolyn

  I could taste the alcohol on my tongue while reading this book. Don't start it without some liquid replenishment nearby.
  
  What I wrote about it in 2005:
  I can't even tell you how incredibly blown away I was by this book. It really took my breathe away. If you only read one book in 2005, make it this one. An alcoholic's rambling stream of conscious, as she ruins her life, and others, again and again. So intense. So well-written. Wow.
• 
  Bobbi

  This was an incredibly well written book. I enjoyed how Kennedy uses mental illness in a way that people can understand the main character still. It almost draws the reader into the story because the real world is vastly different from what one normally experiences. It was incredibly modern and very realistic.
• 
  Alex Taylor

  Admired the writing whilst disliking the story.
• 
  Lena

  4.5
• 
  Paula

  After reading A.L. Kennedy's "Paradise," I had the same feeling I had after seeing the movie Leaving Las Vegas: that I inhabited the world of an alcoholic and was elated that is one problem I do not have. The book opens with Hannah Luckraft finding herself in a rather seedy holiday hotel where she has just had an even seedier dalliance with a wispy married man. And in this opening chapter, you realize there won't be a happy ending. But you are so hopeful when Hannah decides to help an old wheelchair-bound woman, when Hannah meets Robert and when Hannah is transported to rehab. But every time you think some happiness might be around the corner, A.L. Kennedy takes us to another cringe-worthy event. There are no explanations or reasons for Hannah's disease, which she would argue is really a "dis", it just is, which is the whole point I guess. I give this novel high marks for its amazing ability to transport us into this world where this glimpse is enough to sustain me for a very long time.
• 
  Gareth Wain

  I've found A L Kennedy's writing frequently unnerving, profound and funny. When I bought this I was surprised I hadn't read it before. When I was reading it I started thinking maybe I had read it before. Now that I've finished I wonder whether I did read it before or even if I read it properly just now. It's just the nature of the nightmare. Beguiling in each and every way. I too found the end difficult, other books by her have been more easily torturing to the head. Perhaps the quotidian dread of what it is about. Whatever it may be.
• 
  Sara SR

  This book felt like being inside the mind of a recovering amnesic/alcoholic/insufferable individual. Many people in the reviews seem to be praising the writing style, yet that's what bothered me the most. I appreciate the intentions of the author, and can respect that the information we receive mimics the state of Hannah (the main character), but that brought me no joy at all.
  
  It kind of reads like an exercise in creative writing? So I would maybe recommend it to aspiring authors. Not for me though.
• 
  Ellie

  This is a arduous read that provides an excellent glimpse into the mind of an alcoholic. Even so, it was very tedious, repetitive and in the end I thought the book could have had the same ending without 350 pages, maybe 150 would have been fine and still conveyed the same feeling. I didn’t need to be beat over the head to understand this story.
• 
  Poorvi Agarwal

  I have no idea why did I start it or chose to keep up with it but it was enough to boil my insides to an inferno the protgonist goes through out the book.
  .
  Shall be read when experienced or sensibilities are developed.
• 
  Iulia

  Such a tedious narration, and trying so hard to sound clever, it’s plain insufferable. Like the kind of childish writing that continuously draws attention to itself, in the most jarring way. DNF less than 20 pages in.
• 
  Ginette

  I admit I only read 40 pages or so. I just couldn't figure out anything, whether the plot/character/where/what...
  Perhaps I didn't understand something ? If so, please, explain me!
• 
  Ramune Kaz

  Sunki knyga...tokia, kurios greit nepaskaitysi ir siaip nepasidziaugsi ir nepailsesi... O pabaiga...
• 
  leuveen

  Meaningless is the best word to describe this novel. The story, the characters, the daily life, all the drama - it's all terribly written and so incredibly hard to read. I've managed to finish this book only because I was thinking it's a twist and the writing is going to improve. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
• 
  Céline König

  That book will haunt you.
• 
  Klara Mathilde

  Unfassbar poetisches Buch, teilweise hatte man das Gefühl ein Gedicht zu lesen. Recht düster und benötigt viel Aufmerksamkeit um das Buch zu verstehen. Inhaltlich 3/5 stilistisch 5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• 
  Diann Blakely

  *Paradise* is comparable to Denis Johnson's *Jesus' Son*, and to the similarly genius-level novels of Kate Braverman, especially *Lithium for Medea*. Kennedy, like Johnson and Braverman, seems to write straight from the condition of being high. Which, of course, is impossible: all three are lucid to the point of pain. *Paradise* is gorgeous, sorrowful, comic, and perversely, paradoxically feminine, making the lovely cut-crystal tumbler on the cover, a Scottish landscape refracted inside, the most fitting of images. Especially since the glass appears to be sitting on a rough-hewn, government-constructed cement picnic table, and the glass is smudged, not so much stained as apparently unwashed.
  
  *Paradise,* like *Jesus' Son* and *Lithium for Medea*, has elements of romance gone awry. But it's a strangely more solitary book, which allows us deeper access into the mind of a female addict and melds us so unremittingly with her psyche that we not only begin to think the way she does, we think there is no other proper way of thinking. To this end, Kennedy deploys gorgeous modulations of language, from the drunk's slur to tropes for self-disgust to metaphors for hope to the poet's go-for-broke device upon which Braverman relies heavily in all of her novels: repetition. One chapter, in which the protagonist's weaselly boyfriend comes to her place of employment—a bar, of course—to break up with her, opens with a paragraph that serves as foreshadowing and a locus of dread: "I am cutting lemon slices: thin half-circles, notched to fit on the lip of a glass. No one likes doing this, because it stings. You think you're intact, not even a paper cut, but the lemon juice will always search out something, sneak in and bite." By the end of the chapter, these same sentences have different, and even more painful, reverberations.
  
  The jacket copy, which includes strong recommendations from Gail Caldwell of *The Boston Globe* and Richard Ford, makes me embarrassed to report that Ms. Kennedy, who, in her black-leather-jacketed author photo looks well able to hold her own with Mr. Hopper in his wilder roles, has written five previous novels, none of which I've ever heard. I can't think of a better place to start, however, than *Paradise*. If I've been vague about the book's details, it's because the book's emotional momentum derives from its tone and its descriptions of a drunk's various states of mind and body, not any conventional notion of "plot"—the subversion of which, much discussed in feminist criticism, is something else Kennedy shares with Braverman. I've also been vague because I remain under the spell of this novel, which states in no uncertain terms that paradise, no matter how clearly we see it in altered states, always remains blurry when we think it's close to our grasp. Sometimes it requires touch to get our attention. Sometimes it requires blood sacrifice. Sometimes it takes an actual nail driven through our feet.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  (originally published in the *Nashville Scene* / Village Voice Media)
• 
  Becky

  A heartbreakingly 'real' and beautifully written story of and alcoholic's mind. Hannah's behaviour is despicable but Kennedy still succeeds in making her vulnerable, sensitive and kind. In fact the flawed narrator, with her patchy memory, is so like someone I once knew that at times the book floored me.
  
  In many ways this book is a cautionary tale about alcohol. The repetition in the novel is essential to show the patterns of the drinker but because she writes so well and each event moves the plot along, it is never boring. Hannah's relationship with her lover is formed by drink, emboldened by it and destroyed by it. But for me this is more than a book about alcohol. Drink is the medium Kennedy uses for tackling the distorted ways in which humans look at the world. And she does it beautifully.
  
  This book is a must if you are interested in:
  understanding what it means to be a compulsive drinker,
  in the complexity of human beings
  or in beautiful prose.