Down to a Sunless Sea was a challenging and emotional read, but one I took on with interest and intensity. I saw reflections of myself, turned this way or that in the glass of the book, responding to the pictures that are so sharply and courageously drawn of people in inescapable pain, some of whom who seem to be mourning or experiencing deep anguish or torment. It was as if the book were a pool of dark water that revealed a hall of mirrors as I broke the surface in my dive into the deep.
I very much like Freese’s title for this collection, and saw it interlaced throughout the book in the deep and disturbing nature of the stories he tells. I felt drawn to many of his characters, fascinated in a tender way by their dark, even sad, yet striking portraits. To say that I felt their struggles resonating within me would be an understatement. The experience of reading the book may have been heightened somewhat for me by a recent personal loss, but even without fresh pain, reading Down to a Sunless Sea will strike in most readers that common chord of humanity, as they see so clearly before them the desolate, and yet recall the undying hope so many of us carry within.
Matthias Freese’s writing is sensitive, yet starkly illustrative of the sometimes frantic, sometimes muted angst of mental illness and emotional turmoil that his work reveals to readers. It’s as if, at certain moments, I felt the author’s voice as well as hearing it, and I responded with an array of feelings – from anger to compassion, and everything in between.
Every now and then, a turn of the phrase would capture me and take me to another level in my life as a reader. For example, in the story “Unanswerable,” the phrase “…the dead are alive in us…” really struck me – and not simply due to my recent loss, but more because “…that memory is as present as time itself…” I could feel the pain of distance and disappointment, of fear and loathing, mixed with love and confusion and loss in this story, for both the child and the man. As an anthem to numbness, I resonated with the words “…he had no there in him.”
I cannot name a favorite from among the stories; they are each unto themselves unique, and yet that golden thread unites them all and I did not find it difficult to transition from one to the other. Instead, I seemed to want more. I tend to put a book down and then pick it up again, and, true to form, I did that with this collection of stories – the natural breaks from one to the other making my habit fit easily within its covers. Still, I would find myself thinking about the last story I had read and anticipating, not in a voyeuristic fashion but in a sense of being drawn to, the next. I would pass by my study and see the book on the arm of my chair and find myself stopping in when there were other things to do.
I plan to spend more time with Freese’s stories, and encourage especially those who are interested in the mind and in exploring in more detail the inner lives of human persons to read his work. I have recently read The i Tetralogy, and found it a welcome arrival when I was ready to move on from Down to a Sunless Sea. I admit that I was not altogether willing to move on, but after a time of self-reflection, found my footing and did so, eager for more of the rich descriptions to which I had become accustomed. The i Tetralogy did not disappoint, but I did find myself wanting to revisit the intensely personal worlds of Down to a Sunless Sea.
I noted some typographical errors in the printing (errant punctuation such as a comma and period residing in the same location), but – even with my perfectionistic bent as an editor – simply wished them away. Usually, those items of housekeeping distract me when reading, and, were I to be completely honest, they did here – but they did not detract from my overall experience of this read and may have, in some spiritual way, been fitting. My attention was certainly not taken at any point from the sometimes jarring but somehow tranquil journey through the landscape of emotional and mental life, and I dare say that I came away from the reading with a new place opened up inside myself – yet another tender access to my already captivated mind and willing heart.
I congratulate Matthias Freese on a challenging work expertly done.
Aeron Hicks, reviewer
Crossfield Consulting Literary Agency
©2008
