The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne – 582 pages
Book Blurb:
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.
My Review: 5 stars
The Heart’s Invisible Furies lives up to every bit of praise, awards given and crazy hype. This novel is written with honesty and eloquence. It made me laugh and made me sob. Fans of A Little Life will love this book.
When this book came out in 2017 I was overwhelmed with work and a TBR pile that seemed endless. I’d heard the book was great but its length was daunting and my time was short. When my Best Of 2017 list came out, many readers commented that I really missed the boat by not having The Heart’s Invisible Furies on my list. So the minute it came out in paperback, I bought and dug in.
This novel offers complicated, realistic, unique and well-drawn characters. I was never disinterested with any of them. The plot is multi-layered and through those we learn about Ireland, the Catholic Church and its bigotry, gay rights, forbidden love, oppression, adoption and so much more.
This book will stay with you for a long time.
Quotes I liked:
I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves.”
-“Oh, I loved the power I had over him! The power I could sense in myself! You won’t understand this but it’s something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she’s around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it’s even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world. But they don’t. I don’t know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.
-“It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”
– “It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of subterfuge and guile that felt contrary to my nature.”
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