Anna In-Between
a novel by
Elizabeth Nunez
A HARDCOVER Original l ISBN: 978-1-933354-84-2
320 pages | $22.95
Forthcoming: September 2009
"A psychologically and emotionally astute family portrait, with dark themes like racism, cancer and the bittersweet longing of the immigrant."
--New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice)
"Nunez has created a moving and insightful character study while delving into the complexities of identity politics. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal (*starred review*)
"Nunez deftly explores family strife and immigrant identity in her vivid latest . . . with expressive prose and convincing characters that immediately hook the reader."
--Publishers Weekly (*starred review*)
"Nunez offers an intimate portrait of the unknowable secrets and indelible ties that bind husbands and wives, mothers and daughters."
--Booklist
"The award-winning author of Prosperos Daughter has written a novel more intimate than her usual big-picture work; this moving exploration of immigrant identity has a protagonist caught between race, class and a mothers love."
--Ms. Magazine
"A new book by Elizabeth Nunez is always excellent news. Probing and lyrical, this fantastic novel is one of her best yet. Fall into her prose. Immerse yourself in her world. You will not be disappointed."
--Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying
"Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez's best novel. Nunez proves that a great writer, armed with intellect, talent, and very little equipment, can challenge a multibillion-dollar media operation. As long as she writes her magnificent books, characters like the Sinclairs, characters with depth and integrity, will not be hidden from us."
--Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
"In crisp, clear, and beautifully turned prose, Elizabeth Nunez has written a fascinating novel that will profoundly affect the way in which many readers now view the Caribbean. We welcome the voice of the infinitely wise narrator, Anna, who is an expert witness to the seismic changes that take place within and without. A wonderful read."
--Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River
"Elizabeth Nunez has written a contemplative, lush, and measured examination of how a family history can reflect the social history of an island, and how twined together, like fragrant vines, the two can remain."
--Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
"Gripping and richly imagined . . . Nunez is a master at pacing and plotting."
--New York Times (Editors' Choice), on Prospero's Daughter
"Nunez's fiction, with its lush, lyric cadences and whirlwind narrative, casts a seductive spell."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
"[An] exquisite retelling of The Tempest . . . Masterful."
--Kirkus Reviews
"[An] honest and superbly written book."
--Miami Herald, on Prospero's Daughter
Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez's finest literary achievement to date. In spare prose, with laserlike attention to every word and the juxtaposition of words to each other, Nunez returns to her themes of emotional alienation, within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in her earlier novels.
Anna, the novel's main character, who has a successful publishing career in the U.S., is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother, Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to persuade her to go to the U.S. for treatment, even though it is, perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to remain respectful of his wife's wishes, must convince her to change her mind.
In a convergence of craftsmanship, unflinching honesty, and the ability to universalize the lives of her characters, Nunez tells a story that explores our longing for belonging to a community, the age-old love-repulsion relationship between mother and daughter, the Freudian overtones in the love between daughter and father, and the mutual respect that is essential for a successful marriage. One of the crowning achievements of this novel is that it shines a harsh light on the ambiguous situation of this ruling-class family who rose from the constraints of colonialism to employ their own servants. It is a strength of the novel that it understands that the political truth is not distinct from the truth of the family or the truth of love relationships; they are integrated into a unity in this novel constituting one unbroken reality as they are in real life.
Elizabeth Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College in New York City, and the award-winning author of seven novels, including Prosperos Daughter (New York Times Editors' Choice; 2006 Novel of the Year, Black Issues Book Review) and Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award). She is coeditor with Jennifer Sparrow of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. Nunez is executive producer of the 2004 NY Emmy-nominated CUNY TV series Black Writers in America. She divides her time between Amityville, New York and Brooklyn.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The List
Between Nowhere and Happiness, by Daniel Kine:
The book reads like a drugged up Catcher In The Rye. The result of a sometimes hopeless disposition paired with some of the strongest and most poetic prose of the 2000’s, this novel is a small masterpiece. At only 25, Kine has written something that every member of his generation can learn from.
Teach the Free Man, by Peter Nathaniel Malae:
While the first story, "Turning Point," may strike readers as misogynistic, Malae typically shows great pathos and sensitivity in portraying human relationships. Stories such as "Before High Desert" require us to parse conversations as if we were overhearing them from a neighboring cell, paying attention to the feeling behind the words
Nice Big American Baby, by Judy Bunditz:
This is one of the best collections of short stories I've read in a while. The settings and themes vary, but each has at least some element of magical realism. Many of them are creepy, not in a blood-and-guts horrorshow kind of way, but more in a strange, unsettling way. Many of them are sad; "Elephant and Boy" especially touched me. But there is also quite a bit of sly humor, as in "Sales," in which traveling salesmen in some future time are captured by a family and kept penned, and still continue their salesmen-like ways. One of my favorite stories in this volume was "Preparedness," an ultimately rather hopeful tale featuring a world leader who seems quite familiar.
Budnitz writes beautifully. Her writing is filled with interesting images, and yet she never forgets her characters and plots. These stories are rich but not dense. I can strongly recommend this book, and I look forward to reading more of Budnitz's work.
No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July:
It's a testament to July's artistry that the narrators of this arresting first collection elicit empathy rather than groans. "Making Love in 2003," for example, follows a young woman's dubious trajectory from being the passive, discarded object of her writing professor's attentions to seducing a 14-year-old boy in the special-needs class she teaches, while another young woman enters the sex industry when her girlfriend abandons her, with a surprising effect on the relationship. July's characters over these 16 stories get into similarly extreme situations in their quests to be loved and accepted, and often resort to their fantasy lives when the real world disappoints (which is often): the self-effacing narrator of "The Shared Patio" concocts a touching romance around her epilectic Korean neighbor; the aging single man of "The Sister" weaves an elaborate fantasy around his factory colleague Victor's teenage sister (who doesn't exist) to seduce someone else. July's single emotional register is familiar from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it's a capacious one: wry, wistful, vulnerable, tough and tender, it fully accommodates moments of bleak human reversals. These stories are as immediate and distressing as confessionals.
And The Heart Says Whatever, by Emily Gould:
She set out to flout the traditions of many women's memoirs. Her book is the antithesis of personal growth narratives like Eat, Pray, Love — and she may like it that way.
Anthropology Of An American Girl, by Hilary Thayer Hamaan:
This Book is, among other things, a stern rebuke to chick lit everywhere. Coming in at some 600 pages, it reminds us that all human lives are potentially sacred; that no lives should be judged and dismissed out of hand; that young women, though seen for eons as primarily just attractive objects, actually possess soul and will and sentience. This novel follows one girl as she grows up in an Eden she takes for granted with the solipsism of youth. The actual place is the town of East Hampton on Long Island; the book's second half is set for four hectic years in Manhattan during the early '80s, with all its sex and cocaine and money and AIDS whirling in a merciless torrent of social change.
The book reads like a drugged up Catcher In The Rye. The result of a sometimes hopeless disposition paired with some of the strongest and most poetic prose of the 2000’s, this novel is a small masterpiece. At only 25, Kine has written something that every member of his generation can learn from.
Teach the Free Man, by Peter Nathaniel Malae:
While the first story, "Turning Point," may strike readers as misogynistic, Malae typically shows great pathos and sensitivity in portraying human relationships. Stories such as "Before High Desert" require us to parse conversations as if we were overhearing them from a neighboring cell, paying attention to the feeling behind the words
Nice Big American Baby, by Judy Bunditz:
This is one of the best collections of short stories I've read in a while. The settings and themes vary, but each has at least some element of magical realism. Many of them are creepy, not in a blood-and-guts horrorshow kind of way, but more in a strange, unsettling way. Many of them are sad; "Elephant and Boy" especially touched me. But there is also quite a bit of sly humor, as in "Sales," in which traveling salesmen in some future time are captured by a family and kept penned, and still continue their salesmen-like ways. One of my favorite stories in this volume was "Preparedness," an ultimately rather hopeful tale featuring a world leader who seems quite familiar.
Budnitz writes beautifully. Her writing is filled with interesting images, and yet she never forgets her characters and plots. These stories are rich but not dense. I can strongly recommend this book, and I look forward to reading more of Budnitz's work.
No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July:
It's a testament to July's artistry that the narrators of this arresting first collection elicit empathy rather than groans. "Making Love in 2003," for example, follows a young woman's dubious trajectory from being the passive, discarded object of her writing professor's attentions to seducing a 14-year-old boy in the special-needs class she teaches, while another young woman enters the sex industry when her girlfriend abandons her, with a surprising effect on the relationship. July's characters over these 16 stories get into similarly extreme situations in their quests to be loved and accepted, and often resort to their fantasy lives when the real world disappoints (which is often): the self-effacing narrator of "The Shared Patio" concocts a touching romance around her epilectic Korean neighbor; the aging single man of "The Sister" weaves an elaborate fantasy around his factory colleague Victor's teenage sister (who doesn't exist) to seduce someone else. July's single emotional register is familiar from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it's a capacious one: wry, wistful, vulnerable, tough and tender, it fully accommodates moments of bleak human reversals. These stories are as immediate and distressing as confessionals.
And The Heart Says Whatever, by Emily Gould:
She set out to flout the traditions of many women's memoirs. Her book is the antithesis of personal growth narratives like Eat, Pray, Love — and she may like it that way.
Anthropology Of An American Girl, by Hilary Thayer Hamaan:
This Book is, among other things, a stern rebuke to chick lit everywhere. Coming in at some 600 pages, it reminds us that all human lives are potentially sacred; that no lives should be judged and dismissed out of hand; that young women, though seen for eons as primarily just attractive objects, actually possess soul and will and sentience. This novel follows one girl as she grows up in an Eden she takes for granted with the solipsism of youth. The actual place is the town of East Hampton on Long Island; the book's second half is set for four hectic years in Manhattan during the early '80s, with all its sex and cocaine and money and AIDS whirling in a merciless torrent of social change.
From The Guardian
What do we think a novelist most wants to achieve? Surely the reader's interest, attention, captivation. "I couldn't put it down": so the cliché about the pleasure of novel-reading goes. Yet David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas seems to contrive the reader's absorption only in order to break it off. The novel will introduce us to a voice, elaborate a storyline, establish a central character – only to stop in medias res and begin a completely new story. It is composed of six different narratives, set in six different times, in six different genres, and in six distinct forms of narration (journal, letters, omniscient third-person narrator, unreliable first-person narrator, interview transcript, oral reminiscence). The narratives are nested within each other: A is interrupted to make way for B, which is interrupted to make way for C . . . and so on. Only once we have had the central sixth section (the only one to be presented without interruption) do we work our way back, picking up each narrative, in reverse order, at the point at which each was interrupted.
1. Cloud Atlas
2. by David Mitchell
3. 544pp,
4. Sceptre,
5. £4.99
6.
1. Buy Cloud Atlas at the Guardian bookshop
Each interruption leaves us in mid-air. The abrupt termination of the first section, set in the mid 19th century, leaves us with Adam Ewing, en route from the Chatham Islands to San Francisco, convinced that a parasitic worm – Gusano Coco Cervello – is breeding in his brain. His friend Henry Goose, the ship's doctor, has diagnosed his affliction and is attempting to cure it with obscure medicaments. In the next section, comprising letters written in the early 1930s by aspiring young composer Robert Frobisher, Ewing's "journal" is discovered in the library of a reclusive old composer named Vyvyan Ayrs. Reading it, Frobisher is in no doubt of the true meaning of the narrative. "Ewing . . . hasn't spotted his trusty Doctor Henry Goose is a vampire, fuelling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money." But he will have to wait, like us, for the upshot. "To my great annoyance, the pages cease, mid-sentence, some forty pages later, where the binding is worn through." His own story is interrupted after he has wormed his way into the Ayrses' favours, but with the great man's libidinous wife, whom he has bedded, increasingly unpredictable in the demonstration of her affections.
We have got used to Frobisher, a camp, mildly venomous, highly literate narrator, a connoisseur of what is finest, forced to live by his wits. But then a jolt, and we are in some kind of thriller, set in the 1970s, and narrated in the third-person present tense. Journalist Luisa Rey investigates efforts to hush up the dangers of a new nuclear reactor. The interruption of her story is the novel's most conventional cliff-hanger, as a hitman forces her car off the road into the Pacific Ocean – only for us to be forced into a new story, told by loquacious publisher Timothy Cavendish, in some time close to our own, as he finds himself imprisoned in a sinister old people's home somewhere outside Hull. While he eats his institutional lunch, something bad happens – "a chain of firecrackers exploded in my skull and the old world came to an abrupt end". Then what?
Interruption has been made a narrative principle before. In the 18th century, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy had a narrator who kept interrupting himself to insert some new digressive reflection or anecdote. More recently, Cloud Atlas owes an acknowledged debt to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. This book's numbered chapters muse on the pleasures and perplexities of novel-reading. Interleaved with these are 10 opening chapters of 10 supposed novels, each to be interrupted at some narrative climax. Yet Calvino's novel is unified by his own playful presence. Even the samples from novels are being contrived in front of us. "The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph." Mitchell tries something different. He wants you to lose yourself in each story in turn. When the novel's fifth section gives you the interrogation of a rebellious clone, Sonmi~451, in some dystopian future, it is to draw the reader into an unlikely sympathy with the "fabricant", treated as non-human by the "purebloods" she serves. By the time her narration is interrupted, we are to care about her fate – yet not know it.
The structure of interruptions forces connections on the reader. The larger story of domination and predation across civilisations and centuries takes shape because the reader's appetite for connection has been so sharpened. Thus interruption makes for thematic coherence. But, for all its formal trickery, interruption is also a test of the most time-honoured power of a novel. You stop reading: when you start again, does the story come back to life? All novels must survive interruption; Cloud Atlas makes this survival a measure of the reader's enjoyment. It sets out to explore an ordinary mystery: how a narrative that has been put aside can stay in the mind, ready to seize on the reader again.
1. Cloud Atlas
2. by David Mitchell
3. 544pp,
4. Sceptre,
5. £4.99
6.
1. Buy Cloud Atlas at the Guardian bookshop
Each interruption leaves us in mid-air. The abrupt termination of the first section, set in the mid 19th century, leaves us with Adam Ewing, en route from the Chatham Islands to San Francisco, convinced that a parasitic worm – Gusano Coco Cervello – is breeding in his brain. His friend Henry Goose, the ship's doctor, has diagnosed his affliction and is attempting to cure it with obscure medicaments. In the next section, comprising letters written in the early 1930s by aspiring young composer Robert Frobisher, Ewing's "journal" is discovered in the library of a reclusive old composer named Vyvyan Ayrs. Reading it, Frobisher is in no doubt of the true meaning of the narrative. "Ewing . . . hasn't spotted his trusty Doctor Henry Goose is a vampire, fuelling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money." But he will have to wait, like us, for the upshot. "To my great annoyance, the pages cease, mid-sentence, some forty pages later, where the binding is worn through." His own story is interrupted after he has wormed his way into the Ayrses' favours, but with the great man's libidinous wife, whom he has bedded, increasingly unpredictable in the demonstration of her affections.
We have got used to Frobisher, a camp, mildly venomous, highly literate narrator, a connoisseur of what is finest, forced to live by his wits. But then a jolt, and we are in some kind of thriller, set in the 1970s, and narrated in the third-person present tense. Journalist Luisa Rey investigates efforts to hush up the dangers of a new nuclear reactor. The interruption of her story is the novel's most conventional cliff-hanger, as a hitman forces her car off the road into the Pacific Ocean – only for us to be forced into a new story, told by loquacious publisher Timothy Cavendish, in some time close to our own, as he finds himself imprisoned in a sinister old people's home somewhere outside Hull. While he eats his institutional lunch, something bad happens – "a chain of firecrackers exploded in my skull and the old world came to an abrupt end". Then what?
Interruption has been made a narrative principle before. In the 18th century, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy had a narrator who kept interrupting himself to insert some new digressive reflection or anecdote. More recently, Cloud Atlas owes an acknowledged debt to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. This book's numbered chapters muse on the pleasures and perplexities of novel-reading. Interleaved with these are 10 opening chapters of 10 supposed novels, each to be interrupted at some narrative climax. Yet Calvino's novel is unified by his own playful presence. Even the samples from novels are being contrived in front of us. "The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph." Mitchell tries something different. He wants you to lose yourself in each story in turn. When the novel's fifth section gives you the interrogation of a rebellious clone, Sonmi~451, in some dystopian future, it is to draw the reader into an unlikely sympathy with the "fabricant", treated as non-human by the "purebloods" she serves. By the time her narration is interrupted, we are to care about her fate – yet not know it.
The structure of interruptions forces connections on the reader. The larger story of domination and predation across civilisations and centuries takes shape because the reader's appetite for connection has been so sharpened. Thus interruption makes for thematic coherence. But, for all its formal trickery, interruption is also a test of the most time-honoured power of a novel. You stop reading: when you start again, does the story come back to life? All novels must survive interruption; Cloud Atlas makes this survival a measure of the reader's enjoyment. It sets out to explore an ordinary mystery: how a narrative that has been put aside can stay in the mind, ready to seize on the reader again.
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