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A review of Mister Blue from Gloria Beth Amodeo, in The Literary Review

 

I have a hard time not falling in love with a narrator who, as his wife is leaving him for another man, decides to fix her a cup of coffee. But I found it harder to understand how a book managed to send vibrations of deep, deep meaning into my heart, while merely scraping the surface of emotion. “I’m not very good at introspection,” former professor and Hemingway specialist, Jim, tells us. “Generally what I do is glide along the surface of things like a drifting raft that knows nothing about what goes on in the depths of the sea.” Jacques Poulin lets us walk with his narrator step by step, breathing life into the mundaneness of cutting cheese, and exposing the hollow nature of loneliness as scope for the imagination. Mister Blue is a celebration of the unremarkable, a champion for momentary thought, a gift to the world of overlooked intricacies.

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