“I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered.”

Sin by Josephine Hart

I read this after reading "Damage" by same author. This book was also great. Another novella, it contains the same tragic, searing prose as Damage.

This book is about the sin of envy. The main characters are Ruth and Elizabeth, two sisters. Elizabeth is almost..perfect. She has no malice in here, not one drop of craftiness or evil, not even cattiness. There is something innocent and untouched about Elizabeth and maybe that is why Ruth, her sister hates her so much.

Ruth is an empty shell. She is the opposite of Elizabeth. She is joyless. Her only motivation in life..the only thing that gives her even a slight feeling of ..well..something..is ruining Elizabeth's life. Taking Elizabeth's things. Anything that belongs to Elizabeth Ruth must have. She is a woman possessed and her possession lies in her need to totally and completely destroy Elizabeth.

As with Damage, Ruth's selfish desires cause events to spiral out of control leading inevitably to tragedy.

While not as great as Damage, Sin is still a fantastic read. Like with Damage it is a novella and can be read quickly. And like with Damage, this intense litle fire cracker of a book will linger long after you read the last page. ( )

A Masterpiece on the premise and intricacies of Sibling Rivalry. Josephine Hart carries the reader down many a dark alleyway of the mind in what I consider one of the best first-person novels I have come across since Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was captivating, riveting, and sometimes challenging to assimilate about the extent to which Ruth tried to upend her orphan sister Elizabeth. The plot snowballed from minor seeds of hate and envy into gargantuan leaps of Ruth taking over Elizabeth's life, which didn't seem fair, but it was enough to keep me vested in the entire story and see it to the very end. Definitely worth the read. ( )

3.5 stars. This short novel looks at the relationship between Ruth, the narrator, and Elizabeth--first cousins raised a sisters.

Ruth has never forgiven Elizabeth for "taking her place" as the oldest child in her family, before Ruth was even born. Ruth desperately wants to be the only. And, as a bit of a sociopath, Ruth spends her entire life trying to beat and be Elizabeth. She steals her clothing, aims to steal boyfriends, everything in Ruth's life is about getting revenge on Elizabeth.

This is quite well done and is well paced. It is creepy and sad and I could not help but wonder why Ruth is like this. Is it just innate confusion/jealousy based on how they were raised? Is she simply a sociopath and if it weren't this it would have been something else? Or was there some specific event that made her hate her sister-cousin so much? I really wanted a bit more of a reason--especially seeing how Ruth did not grow out of this behavior, she really doubled down in adulthood. I wonder if I missed something, or if no reason was given. ( )

This author is just not for me. After being disappointed with [b:Damage|109961|Damage|Josephine Hart|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1282162507s/109961.jpg|1399942] I thought I'd give her a second chance. If you see my review of the first book, you might wonder how similar this review is to my review for Damage. That's because Sin just seems to be a repackaging of that first novel, with a few gender changes and plot re-arrangements. Stories of deep, dark emotion, without the depth required for satisfying character development. Adulterous affairs that lack passion, sex without intimacy, and the writer's clumsiness at handling tragic death, which in both novels is (unintentionally) reduced to trivial events. It seems Ms Hart has trouble writing these death scenes, and her attempts at this appear sophomoric.

I find her prose bordering on pretentious, again with an imagery that I find esoteric, even affected.
"But what blinds us to our unpredictable past?"
The incongruous juxtaposition of 'unpredictable' and 'past' risks stopping the reader in his/her tracks. It did to me. I can only assume the meaning is that our memories are often distorted, but she could have used a better adjective, as 'the past' is irrelevant in the context of 'prediction.' This sort of heavy-handedness abounds throughout.

I don't contest that there are some paragraphs written with poignancy and elegance, but they were not enough to carry the novel to satisfaction.

( )

No one writes a biting, compulsively readable psychological drama like Ms Hart. This is a disturbing tale of obsession, sex and death. ( )

Well, this was a silly little book. A book that treats writing like Juliet Binoche treats acting. That is to say, with a lot of insubstantial intensity, and mystic eyes. You can read Sin in a sitting, and get up feeling pensive, taciturn, and violent. Or you can read it in little chunks over a period of weeks, while you're giving your children a bath, like I did, and every time you open the book you have to remember how serious life is, how morbid, how dire, how dramatic. How everyone uses small sentences, and feels things deeply, so deeply.

I read it before, years ago, and recently somehow via some used book shelf it came back into my life. The same edition too. Page 169 still seems to bear the blush of shame after my shuddering eye-roll. The last few lines:

These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please, answer me.
Answer me, as I leave you now.
As I leave you.
As I leave.

The only work of fiction I've seen trying to end on an echo effect, like a power ballad from the 80s. If the ending seems unforgivable, you should know that there are other disastrous lines in the book too. Like this one:

Hours later, Dominick lay on top of me. And whispered love again. And again. Perhaps the music in his own head made him deaf to my silence.

"Deaf to my silence"? That's one of those lines that sounds complex and interesting, but in reality means nothing. Like Juliet Binoche again. She can be thinking of her grocery list, but as long as she fires up her "piercing depths" eye lock, you'd think she was decoding the fate of the world. Hart knows how to ratchet up the drama in the way a scene sounds, even if the plot is really a rather standard soap opera chain of events. Adultery, death, rivalry, hatred, love, etc. The pounding drum in the language, the constant syntactic reminders that This! Is! Dramatic! actually diffuse the drama from her character's troubles, much the way a soap opera's soundtrack can make light afternoon fare out of murder and betrayal.

I am simultaneously reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, and Sin does not bear up well in contrast, since McCourt's delivery of disaster and wretchedness is at low volume, with no fanfare, no sonorous words, no short sentences drifting off into black. Unfair comparison, maybe, but... still. ( )