The Birth of Love Reviews
... Uninhibitedly truthful...forceful and daring and relevant...To surrender yourself to the revelations of...life and then to come back with the assertions of prose: that is the new heroism of the woman writer, and Kavenna is in the vanguard of it.
Rachel Cusk, Observer
The book‘s provocations are fascinating, and few writers have matched her ruthlessly naturalistic depiction of modern childbirth as half farce, half horror story.
The New Yorker
Once upon a time, love in novels tended decorously to resolve into marriage. We‘ve long since become used to its gleeful anatomising as sex and lust; but Joanna Kavenna‘s new novel takes readers into terrain that is still relatively virgin—the visceral, slippery business of birth, and its human intimacies...[A] heady and ultimately moving annexation of fertile terrain for fiction.
Tom Chatfield, Prospect
Kavenna tracks her [Brigid‘s] moods, her superficial perceptions and the deeper urges of childbirth brilliantly...[T]he description of her labour is awful and thrilling...[T]he final section ties up the stories in an exciting, headlong race towards redemption and new possibilities.
Lucy Dallas, Times Literary Supplement
...[A] meditation on orthodoxies and love‘s endurance...as ambitious and original as her prize-winning first novel, Inglorious.
Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times
A braided narrative twisting together seemingly disparate stories over a three-century span, The Birth of Love demands close attention, but it also yields new pleasures and challenges. Those multiple stories, it turns out, are not so disparate after all.
While some of the most compelling scenes are told from the perspective of Brigid Hayes, a middle-aged, contemporary Londoner in labor with her second child, we also get her husband's distinctive vantage point as he views "the terrifying beauty of the birth -- the gory sundering." Brigid's labor is ultimately full of the medical interventions she hoped to avoid, but the description of her struggle in an enlightened age proves as suspenseful as the historical scenes depicting horrifying medical practices.
Kavenna...finishes with tremendous narrative force, and the depiction of birth in the novel's final pages is riveting. She manages to pull tighter and tighter a mighty number of scientific, mythical, historical and philosophical strands, all while holding the cerebral and the worldly in good balance. Nervy enough to give her novel the lofty title The Birth of Love, Kavenna is ambitious and inventive enough, finally, to earn it. She's a compelling and original writer, and we readers -- I'm talking female and male here -- should keep our eyes on her.
Valerie Sayers, Washington Post
Four starkly disparate stories, all anchored in the agonising mystery of childbirth, lock together in Joanna Kavenna's ambitious second novel. Each account is framed by its character's grasp, perhaps partial, of the elemental force of procreation, either as an instinctive urge or a physically shattering, dangerous process. Fulsome with gory detail, Kavenna's rich emotional palette conjures mortal terror, exhausted surrender and endorphin-soaked, unalloyed bliss as well as subtler responses to her maternal material: indefinable yearning, humility in the face of the miraculous, a persistent questioning of women's ownership of their bodies. ...
The Birth of Love is replete with complex nuances and presumptions that surround the state of motherhood and tangentially connect to ideas of madness in ways that recall the spiky outrage of Kate Millett's seminal The Loony Bin Trip.
...Bear[s] out the promise of Inglorious, Kavenna's courageous debut novel of untethered nervous breakdown, which used spare prose and arresting imagery to chart the decline, mental and social, of a seemingly competent professional into a homeless woman...Elegantly crafted and compelling...[it] touches a core of humanity articulated, rather surprisingly, by the hermit-like Stone, when he reflects how we are all "governed by ancient impulses – a desire for human company, love, intimacy, family, a fear of darkness and the unknown, an aversion to pain, a curious sense of hope, despite everything".
James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday
Literature is full of death and sex, but the third part of the elemental trilogy that defines our lives – birth – is relatively absent. Babies there are aplenty, but when it comes to the act of parturition itself, with its rich quota of joy, peril and gore, things go strangely quiet. You could cite Kitty in Anna Karenina, or certain scenes in AS Byatt and Doris Lessing, but the list soon peters out.
Joanna Kavenna‘s novel changes all that.
...Kavenna has made [Brigid] a poignant everywoman, the central panel in a powerful triptych...You don‘t have to have given birth to enjoy it, though I‘d certainly recommend it to anyone who has.
Jonathan Gibb, Financial Times
Depending on your position, childbearing is a stupendous miracle, a persistent hell or `an exercise in optimism' -- and at times all and more at once. But in Orange Prize-winning British author Joanna Kavenna's new novel, women's eternal predicament (and ensuing issues of parenting and being parented) anchors a slick, ambitious narrative deftly entwined with life's other complex balancing act: keeping hold of reason and sanity.
The four-part narrative is never mawkish, shifting from past to present to future and back with steady prose and a meticulous design that leaves neither the subtle nor symbolic to chance...From Kavenna's protean novel emerges a brilliant whole.
Christine Thomas, Miami Herald
Clever, ambitious ... it is a tribute to [Kavenna‘s] skill that she handles her four narrative strands without lapsing into confusion; the reader is deftly directed on a journey through time and place ... Stone‘s catastrophic loss of nerve at his launch party makes painful but wholly credible reading. Even more sympathetically depicted is Brigid, a woman struggling to deal with the onset of her second labour and the demands of her little son. I have rarely read such an accurate description of the emotional ambivalence of this stage of motherhood, the weird combination of boredom and passion, the seesawing between a sense of personal insignificance and its exact opposite ... Brigid‘s world, created with humour and sharp observation, reminded me of the best of Helen Simpson‘s short stories.
Charlotte Moore, Spectator
Her characters ... are enjoyably individual. Kavenna‘s skill in flitting between markedly different circumstances and fantastical times is evident and she crafts her tale using snappy paragraphs and free-flowing narrative. A wonderfully imagined story.
Julian Fleming, Sunday Business Post
It is hard to deny its complexity and verve, or to remain unmoved by the bittersweet vision of motherhood it presents.
Edmund Gordon, Literary Review
...[A]s gruelling an account of labour as poor old Kristin Lavransdatter's hard time in the straw, in Sigrid Undset's Norwegian classic...[T]he writing is brilliant...
Ursula Le Guin, Guardian
Kavenna won the Orange Award for New Writers with Inglorious. Now she‘s back with an equally singular novel about motherhood. In Vienna, in 1865, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis is bundled into a mental asylum for his theories. In modern London, Michael Stone publishes a novel about Semmelweis, while Brigid Hayes worries about the birth of her second child. And in 2153, when children are born and raised in special breeding centres, someone gets illegally knocked up and Prisoner 730004 goes on trial for concealing it. Past, present and future are cleverly woven into a meditation about the shattering experience of birth.
Kate Saunders, Times
Fascinating novel...It is beautifully written ...This is a novel with a strong message, reflected in the title – that love and our emotional response to childbirth are central to the experience and should be valued.
www.thebookbag.co.uk
Highly symbolic and wonderfully suspenseful, Kavenna‘s distinctive voices from the past, present and future join the proclaim the wonder of birth.
Library Journal
Procreation in three disparate centuries and societies is the primal subject of a prize-winning British writer‘s original second novel...Kavenna displays technical dexterity while offering a textured assessment – from the corporeal to the cerebral – of a totemic subject...Surprisingly affecting.
Kirkus Reviews
Her writing is sharp, her four narrative voices are nuanced and distinctive, and her emotional, intellectual and stylistic range is impressive.
Publishers Weekly
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