When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living because she can’t bear the sight of the tidy line of his shirt collars hanging in the wardrobe, she triggers an existential crisis that dominates this debut novel: ‘The notion that I was free in theory but also in practice to do whatever I liked with my life was terrifying: it was nothing short of a nightmare.’
She moves to a cottage, where she lives alone, worrying variously about the plight of women and the state of a world that is on fire or under water depending on the season. She contemplates suicide, but is too cowardly for this ‘pitiful act of self-assertion’, and instead lands a job at a university, where she chooses to research Paul Celan, a postwar German-language poet who took his own life.
The story, such as it is, unfolds via a series of vignettes laced with wry takes on mundane experiences, from the banality of train travel to the surprising popularity of team sports among academics.
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