By Jacqueline Bublitz
I can’t say I had read a book quite like Jacqueline Bublitz’ debut novel “Before you Knew My Name.”
Have you ever asked yourself about the meaning of YOU? Where are we from and how did we get here? Why are you who you are? Why do you feel how you feel? Where are you now and how did you get here?
This novel delves into an important time in the life of two women, Alice and Ruby. At first you think you are being set up to see how their worlds will collide, and in one sense they do, but it’s not a collision at all what you expect. Their lives become entangled, if you will; their lives and… I’ll leave it there.
Bublitz’ prose is exquisite, her descriptions like poetry. The pace of this story is like you’re floating on barge along a fast river and you roll into a different world from page to page. In this narrative you bump into descriptions hundreds of times, each one carrying you through labyrinths of words and worlds that materialize in your head into emotions, lives and images. In reading it we’re living in the heads of so many different people, all at the same time.This novel is not just one story, or one character’s world. There are two protagonists but you get so much about the other’s characters lives and feelings as to have many novels wrapped up in one.
It is written in first person and third person. Yet somewhere down the road of the sentences you feel each character is showing him or herself in first person.
“No one lives just one life. We start and finish our worlds many times over”
If you’re keen enough, you’ll find tiny slithers here and there on the meaning of life, or the lack thereof; tidbits about consequences for our actions or inaction, and the premise on what it is that makes us who we are, who we become.
Interesting quotes from the book
“They don’t teach you how to be out of the world anymore than they teach you how to be in it.’
“No matter how long or short a time we are here, I’m beginning to realize we all want more than we get.”
“No one lives just one life. We start and finish our worlds many times over.”
The worst thing about this book is you can’t put it down.
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