Review of Leveret By Anna Goldreich – the rabbit fixes the pain of the loss of children | Fiction

Being born. “To remove, to release something, that’s the pain.” A small, curled and shriveled animal was freed from the pain. But then, instead of the prolonged crying of a baby: silence.

This is the story of Anna Goldreich’s brilliant and quietly devastating debut novel The Leveret, a novel that asks us to look at late-term abortion as the death it feels to many women. Since her miscarriage six months ago, Clare has felt that everyone, including her friend Phoebe, has been waiting impatiently for her to get on with her life. But he remains sad and lost, waiting for that first cry.

Wanting to make a big change, the family moved to another village in the village where Febe grew up. Phoebe is busy helping her parents with the farmers and the sheep while Clare stays at home every day, unable to eat. Pregnancy was the first time Clare felt like a real person with a physical body – not the “floating head” she had made herself out to be. The determination of the child’s growing body made him more self-aware. Now he finds himself without a real one – until he finds a rabbit abandoned under the castle.

Goldreich describes the experience as a second birth, filled with a refreshing life that the first birth lacked. Clare reaches through the thorns, “and through the pain, through the tearing, there is softness. My hand above the head, fingers stretched across the back…. Him. As a stillborn child who was admitted to the hospital, Clare finds herself coaxing a rabbit with her tongue, and feels that she has come back to life.

It’s a wonderful scene, written with absolute conviction, and from this point Goldreich manages to create a moment between Clare and the baby rabbit she calls Isla in a strange way, even if it starts to get confusing. Goldreich holds three possibilities at once for the reader: the rabbit as a symbol of mental illness; Hare was eager but unwise to try to heal herself on Clare’s side; rabbit as a way to find the definitive truth that we are creatures that need to connect with the world. For several weeks, the leveret sleeps in Clare’s arms and is carried in a sling. Isla then goes wild, and Clare keeps pretending that these are rebels, trapping a rabbit in a house that she can’t escape as she follows Isla’s height to the door and talks about her mother as Isla’s “grandma”.

Leveret is a small book in some ways. Goldreich tries to make it polyphonic by changing the themes from Clare and Phoebe, but Phoebe’s vocal parts don’t escape. There is a sense that Phoebe doesn’t share the kind of language that Clare imagines – that, perhaps, she doesn’t think at all. This presents a literary challenge that many authors have struggled with; Phoebe’s love for Clare has a lot to do with the plot, but the frequent line breaks in these episodes are unconvincing. However, Goldreich is amazingly good at bringing the early miscarriage and Clare’s relationship with the rabbit to such visceral life that this is a successful first novel. The need for new forms of our relationship with nature inspires a lot of writing today, and Goldreich’s approach here is grim and unsettling.

In the end, it’s up to Phoebe to win Clare back for the love of humanity. The book is left unclear as to whether Clare has saved the rabbit’s life or ruined his luck; but Isla has restored to Clare some of the real things that motherhood promised, and perhaps the real failure of this project with Isla is a part of that. In a very short moment, Phoebe emits “a strange cry from the bottom of some poor creature, a silent sound, passing through the wind”, allowing a moving awareness of the mammalian body that can be possible in the love between Clare and Phoebe.