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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
'The Wife' once exchanged love letters with her husband, coyly postmarked the Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes -the arrival of a child and, later, a lover - the Wife puzzles over the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and romantic love. With mordant wit, the Wife analyzes her predicament, offering ferocious, wry, often devastating reflections on matrimony, motherhood, artistic ambition, and the condition of universal shipwreck that presents itself to so many of us at midlife.
Rezensionen (6)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Popping prose and touching vignettes of marriage and motherhood fill Offill's (Last Things) slim second book of fiction. Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty, this book is both readable in a single sitting and far ranging in the emotions it raises. The 46 short chapters are told mostly in brief fragments and fly through the life of the nameless heroine. Her mind wanders from everyday tasks and struggles, the beginnings of her marriage, the highs and lows with her husband, the joys of having a daughter. These domestic bits are contrasted by far-flung thoughts that whirl in every direction, from space aviation and sea exploration to ancient philosophy and Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics. Anecdotes and quotes also come from all over: Einstein, Eliot, Keats, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. Often, the use of third person places the heroine at a distance, examining the macro-reality of her life, but then Offill will zoom in, giving the reader a view into her heroine's inner life-notes, graded papers and corrected manuscripts, monologues, imagined Christmas cards and questionnaires. Offill has equal parts cleverness and erudition, but it's her language and eye for detail that make this a must-read: "Just after she turns five my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution.... I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn't. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him. 'Everybody has bad thoughts,' I tell her. 'Just try not to act on them.' " (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
This is a magnetic novel about a marriage of giddy bliss and stratospheric anxiety, bedrock alliance and wrenching tectonic shifts. Offill, author of the novel Last Things (1999) and various children's books, covers this shifting terrain and its stormy weather in an exquisitely fine-tuned, journal-like account narrated by the wife, an ironic self-designation rooted in her growing fears about her marital state. She is smart if a bit drifty, imaginative and selectively observant, and so precisely articulate that her perfect, simple sentences vibrate like violin strings. And she is mordantly funny, a wry taxonomist of emotions and relationships. Her dispatches from the fog of new motherhood are hilarious and subversive. Her cynical pursuit of self-improvement is painfully accurate. Her Richter-scale analysis of the aftershocks of infidelity is gripping. Nothing depicted in this portrait of a family in quiet disarray is unfamiliar in life or in literature, and that is the artistic magic of Offill's stunning performance. She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope slide and magnified it until it fills the mind's eye and the heart.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
Offill's slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction - on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it's a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.
Guardian Review
Indian-American writer's winning book, Family Life, which took him 13 years to complete, is praised by head judge as 'a masterful novel of distilled complexity' The Indian-American writer Akhil Sharma has been named winner of the second Folio prize for fiction for a novel which took him 13 long and painful years to complete, charting one emigrant family's heartwrenching search for the American dream. Writing it, he admitted after receiving the [pound]40,000 prize, was a frustrating, difficult challenge, often "like chewing stones" with around nine wasted years when it did not go well. "I'm glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn't been the guy who wrote it," he said. Sharma won the prize for his second novel, Family Life, an autobiographical work which tells the story of a young boy Ajay and his family who emigrate from Delhi to New York in search of a better life. All is turned upside down when Ajay's older brother has a dreadful swimming pool accident and needs round-the-clock care from then on. Sharma, a former investment banker, said he was professionally happy the book existed and that people were reading the story of care givers but he admitted he thought about giving up on a regular basis. He stuck with it: "I couldn't bear the idea of having spent all those years and then nothing good having come out of it. "In the end I feel the book itself is good, it does certain things that are artistically impressive so I feel good about that." His feelings on winning were mixed and the first emotion he felt was shame because compared to his late brother "I have received too much luck." Parts of the writing process were fun, he said, but much of it was not. "I'm 43. I started writing this when I was 30 so I spent my thirties writing this thing... I really feel like I shattered my youth." William Fiennes, who chaired the judges, praised the novel, currently a bestseller in the US, as "lucid, compassionate, quietly funny". He added: "Family Life is a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility. "We loved its deceptive simplicity and rare warmth... This is a work of art that expands with each re-reading and a novel that will endure." It was chosen from a shortlist of eight books which included what was the bookmakers' favourite for the prize, Ali Smith's novel How To Be Both. Andrew Kidd, the literary agent who co-founded the Folio prize, said: "In this second year of the prize our five judges have again lived up to every expectation, selecting from a glorious shortlist a heartbreaking and funny novel whose astonishing power is achieved in constantly surprising ways." He said the novel was already a huge success in the US. "We are delighted that the Folio prize will now help it to find many more readers, both in the UK and around the world." Sharma was presented with the prize, which comes with a cheque for [pound]40,000, at a ceremony in King's Cross, London, on Monday. The humorist David Sedaris has called the book "outstanding". "Every page is alive and surprising, proof of his huge, unique talent." The prize, sponsored by the Folio Society, was created last year with the aim of celebrating the year's best English-language fiction, regardless of form, genre and geography. Its first winner was the American short story writer George Saunders for his collection Tenth of December. The Folio was born out of frustration at perceived weaknesses of the Man Booker prize and anger at what was described as the "dumbed down" shortlist of 2011. One particular complaint was that it continued to bar US writers, an issue subsequently addressed by opening up the Booker to all novelists writing in the English language. In a crowded literary prize calendar the Folio has tried hard to show its distinctiveness. It is, for example, a prize decided by writers and critics only, drawn by lots from an academy of 234 people who are "immersed in the world of books". Unusually, it also lists the books that did not make the shortlist by revealing the 80 titles that were read by judges. The other shortlisted candidates were 10:04 by Ben Lerner, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Dust by Adhiambo Owuor, Nora Webster by Colm Toibin, and Outline by Rachel Cusk. The judging panel chaired by Fiennes consisted of Observer writer Rachel Cooke and writers Mohsin Hamid, AM Homes, and Deborah Levy. - Mark Brown.
Kirkus-Rezension
Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling. If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. The story is most European, too; says the narrator, "I spent my afternoons in a city park, pretending to read Horace. At dusk, people streamed out of the Mtro and into the street. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful." Well, oui. The principal character is "the wife," nameless but not faceless, who enters into a relationship and then marriage with all the brave hope attendant in the enterprise. Offill (Last Things, 1999, etc.) is fond of pointed apothegms ("Life equals structure plus activity") and reflections in the place of actual action, but as the story progresses, it's clear that events test that hope--to say nothing of hubby's refusal at first to pull down a decent salary, so the young family finds itself "running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips." Material conditions improve, but that hope gets whittled away further with the years, leading to moments worthy of a postmodern version of Diary of a Mad Housewife: "The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index." The fragmented story, true though it may be to our splintered, too busy lives, is sometimes hard to follow, and at times, the writing is precious, even if we're always pulled back into gritty reality: "I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease." There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal-Rezension
At first, the fragmentary nature of this second novel by Offill (Last Things) makes it difficult to fit the pieces into a whole. As the work progresses, however, listeners are presented with the story of a marriage, of motherhood, and of trying to write the elusive second novel. The unnamed wife, whose tale this is, weaves the narrative fragments into an eventually moving and compelling portrait of her life in Brooklyn, a life in which she must attempt to balance her roles as spouse, mother, and author while keeping herself whole. Not all authors read their own work well, but Offill does so here in a nuanced performance that helps the listener keep track of the narrative fragments. VERDICT Highly recommended. ["Offill's lean prose and the addition of astute quotations prevent the text from becoming just one more story of an infidelity. Her writing is exquisitely honed and vibrant," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 11/1/13.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.