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Summary
Summary
One of Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize * Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize * An Irish Times Best Book of the Year
"One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read." --New York Times Book Review
The acclaimed novel about a couple who, pushing against traditional expectations, move with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society.
It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another--one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they've drifted.
They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, "as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards." They make a promise to climb the mountain, but--over the course of the next seven years--it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes.
Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through Bell and Sigh, and the life they create for themselves, Sara Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid out before us--and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person, and to the landscape.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
The Irish writer and artist Sara Baume is still best known for her 2015 debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither; Seven Steeples, her third novel, is a glacially beautiful book. I am almost certain it's a ghost story, but it's a novel that gives up its secrets warily. Bell and Sigh are a couple who leave the city with their dogs to rent a cottage by the sea and withdraw steadily from their lives, seeking to live in an atmosphere of continuous temporariness. I couldn't help but think of the ring of bells and the sound of sighs as stock motifs of ghost stories the world over. But I believe this novel will mean profoundly different things to different readers, because its own presiding spirit is surely Elizabeth Bishop, who worked so carefully at keeping feeling unspoken under the surface of her poetry, only revealing the heart through the physical world: she understood that emotion would shine out through detail, through specific, close observation. As if in tribute, Baume offers up an astonishing prose poem that keeps close religiously and lovingly to the physical throughout. Bell, the female character, has a habit of "touching things to draw blessedness out of them", and this is absolutely what Baume is doing throughout. In the paraphernalia of a life, its coffee grinds and washing lines, love and meaning are hiding - because all the meaning in our lives happens around these things, our little days, so where else would it end up secreted? From time to time, the reader is teased with a glimpse of some possible catastrophe that might have prompted the couple's retreat from the world - a mouse dies "of trauma"; Bell and Sigh see "a solid mass the size of a premature foetus" on the beach, and mistake a thistle growing by their house for a child "ten times a day" (the novel aches with the absence of children). They love looking at maps online because on the internet they can "go back in time", which feels like the revelation of a deeply felt wish. But the revelation never quite comes, in a way that is haunting and dreamlike and wonderful to read. What is shared instead is a record of two people who "had imagined, in the beginning, that if everything they owned was old and shoddy, even ugly, certainly nearing the end of its useful life, then they would better be able to bear its loss". Their project, of course, eventually fails - they fall in love with these ugly, shoddy, temporary things, because they are their lives. In the meantime, though, Baume catalogues the accrual of dirt, broken things and insect bites - one way of totting up a life. Her novel powerfully recalls the middle act of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, that heart-stoppingly moving depiction of time passing through an empty house, of loss accumulating. At the novel's end, Baume finally sends her protagonists up the mountain they live on, a climb they've been meaning to get round to for seven years. Looking back at their house with them, I felt I was given a revelation of what had been going on all this time - but what I saw will be very different from how the story looks in the eyes of others. That is the magic and the brilliance of this haunting, fathomlessly sad book.
Booklist Review
Bell and Sigh didn't know what their futures held, but they knew they wanted to share them. After meeting on a hiking trip at the base of a stubby Irish mountain, they discover their mutual distaste for their boisterous families, their shared misanthropic streaks, and their enduring respect for nature. Most importantly, they realize they can build a life together, on their own terms. They rent a dilapidated cabin on a mountain south of Dublin, contributing their dogs, a van load of mismatched household belongings, and their ideals to their new homestead. Bell and Sigh are thrilled to carve out a slice of land for themselves, adopting gardening, composting, and an increasingly tolerant attitude towards bugs and mice. Baume (A Line Made by Walking, 2017) leads readers through eight years of the couple's life together as they neglect most of modern society and build a deep, rich domestic life. Lush imagery and poetic punctuation choices are ever-present in Seven Steeples, appealing to fans of Paulette Jiles and Geraldine Brooks. Charting the path between independence and dependence, self-reliance and self-interest, Baume sets readers down in a near-untamed wilderness and shrinks the world down to a garden, a cabin, and its profoundly resilient occupants.
Library Journal Review
Shortly after they meet and recognize they are kindred spirits who crave solitude, Bell (Isabel) and Sigh (Simon) decide they have had enough of waitressing, factory work, and yes, even their families and friends. Taking a chance on a life alone together, they rent a lichen-encrusted cottage in a remote part of Ireland at the foot of a mountain they promise themselves they will someday climb. Together with their two dogs, they set up housekeeping with discards from the very people with whom they've cut ties and begin a new minimalist life with few modern distractions. Every aspect of the flora and fauna they observe on their daily walks is described in language so mesmerizing that even a bird poo stain on laundry becomes a work of art. As the years pass, their comical neglect of the most basic details of daily living binds these two sweet misanthropes ever closer together. VERDICT Award-winning novelist Baume's gifts as a visual artist can be seen not only in the poetry of her majestic words but also in her creative use of spacing that enhances this lovely novel that is made for this time in history of pandemic-triggered isolation.--Beth E. Andersen