Paradox as a Belief System

I am usually a reviewer of fiction. I shall try to read this book — of seeming academic strength as well as, no doubt, authorial sentiment — as fiction, but I already sense it has a preternatural truth about it that often makes fiction, from my empirical work upon it, even truer than truth. A paradox, perhaps. Yet this beautiful first chapter confirms me in such a belief.
I have publicly called ‘A World of Love’ by Elizabeth Bowen, although a novella, the greatest ever ghost story. And now we have this chapter that fulfils my belief on a level yet to be established. A “psychic affinity” between not only sender and recipient of a letter (any letter but I suppose LOVE letters in particular), but also sender and recipient of fiction. A two-way filter, perhaps. A mutual synergy. An “electric connection.”

“I heard the dynamic voice not just of one of my favourite novelists, but one of the great writers of the twentieth century.”

Indeed.

From the start of my review of THE SHADOWY THIRD by Julia Parry: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/the-shadowy-third-julia-parry/