Dear Thief is a contemplation, condemnation and reverence all at once to the consequences of time. Time in the story is captured in fractals, and the temporal shifts are so frequent that it gave the narrative a dreamy, almost surreal effect (and sometimes, sharp and biting). The thief here IS time, but it is also the woman who stole affection from the narrator’s husband. Samantha Harvey was inspired by Leonard Cohen’s song, Famous Blue Raincoat, which I recommend listening to, especially for its moody potency. Harvey captures his melancholic longing; the impassioned fallout of a triangulating affair; as well as many of his images. But she creates her own piercing story.



I am trying to put words together to write a review, and I feel stymied by the task—I just want to quote passages in the book, and re-read it! The abstract and the real are bound up in each other, and the strength of the story lies in the prose, and the keen memories both imprisoned and freed by time. You can take any page and meditate on its prowess, its trenchant intelligence, its numinous passages, and Harvey’s ability to cut deeply into enduring questions about life, love, friendship, betrayal, decay, and death. She does this through her narrator (unnamed), who is writing an extended letter to a woman friend that she hasn’t seen in seventeen years.



Nina, aka Butterfly, was the narrator’s friend since childhood. They met while both living close to the Welsh border, in England (the narrator’s origin). Both came from scholarly families. A Lithuanian Jew who later became an avid reader of the Vedic Upanishads, Nina was uprooted early in life (and escaped from the dangers of communism in Lithuania), which shaped her into an unsettled person who flees at the idea of permanence. (In fact, the narrator has endured several disappearances and reappearances of Nina throughout her life).



“…devotion was not a quality you asked of people, commitment neither; you did not give these things and did not ask for them. If you could give and receive moments of happiness and self-escape, that was enough, that was, in fact, everything.”



Butterfly encroached on the narrator’s husband, Nicolas, as we learn early on. This isn’t a plot-centered story, although you are rewarded with a thoughtful, provocative tale that covers the deepest of human emotions. The narrator knew that Nina was a threat, when Nina declaimed:



“…a triangle is the holiest and most elegant of things; with two lines you can only create two lines, but with three you can create a shape. That is why three is a transformative number.”



And that is when the writer knew that she would be betrayed:



“…You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy, and I, pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle, would have to watch it happen.”



But, much of it incites the reader to ponder how the past informs the present--and does so with a dose of nihilism.



“…there is freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.”



The unreliable narrator recalls memory after memory, and turns them over and slides her pen through them, her hands, her words, and her relationship with her husband and with her friend, turning them over and around so that time and memory are both fractured and oiled, a freedom and constraint bound up in each other. The narrator begins with a question that Nina once asked her—whether she has ever seen through “the gauze of this life.” The entire book unfolds as if through gauze, also, a kind of meta-fictional play on theme that is captured in structure, an impressionistic portrait that is framed with loss, but not just loss; there is also a sense of wonder that is subtly exciting, spiritual. Throughout the text, the narrator returns to this question, which carries both acute significance and rebellious irony.



“ ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ …perhaps I said something first about how early morning is thinner, less real, how I felt I could pass through the mist, steam, and smoke, through the wet wool, into a reality beyond….And I said, ‘Is there a gauze?’’



The narrator also projects thoughts and feelings onto the mercurial Nina, so that at times they are two people merged. The telling of Nina becomes a journey through past events juxtaposed with speculative ideas of her, peppered with metaphysical descriptions of the world around. Now that the writer works with the elderly at a nursing home, she contemplates death as a kind of landscape, and time as an inviolable threshold.



“You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”



It’s this heap of days that both consoles and ravages the narrator. Through this letter, she ruminates on the illusory and enigmatic nature of our relationships with each other, the world, and ourselves.



“I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes…--knowing ourselves intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbor all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day.”



I can only touch on a fraction of this seductive story, a book about the ungraspable, the inexplicable.



“All I mean is: aren’t written words strange in this way, so inscrutable, all hurrying together on the paper to cover up reality like a curtain drawn across a stage.”