The Uses of Enchantment - A Novel

Zusatztext “A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train. . . . Entertaining! devastating and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine’s lank hair.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “The quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology! ideology! and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of Heidi Julavits's new novel. . . . A riveting! at times deeply funny! disturbing book.” — The Boston Globe “Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart! trickily constructed.” — The New York Times “An ingenious! seriocomic study of the female imagination’s power to alter and contort the lives it touches.” — The Miami Herald Informationen zum Autor Heidi Julavits is the author of two previous novels, The Mineral Palace and The Effect of Living Backwards , as well as a collaborative book, Hotel Andromeda , with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a founding editor of The Believer , and her writings have appeared in Esquire, Time, The New York Times, McSweeney's among other places. She lives in Manhattan and Maine. Klappentext One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share. Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance? This question haunts Mary's family, her psychologist, even Mary herself. Weaving together three narratives, The Uses of Enchantment conjures a spell in which the hallucinatory power of a young woman's sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has devastating consequences for all involved. Leseprobe What Might Have Happened NOVEMBER 7, 1985 The following might have happened on a late-fall afternoon in the Boston suburb of West Salem. The afternoon in question was biting enough to suggest the early possibility of snow. The cloud cover made it seem later than the actual time of 3:35 p.m. The girl was one of many girls in field hockey skirts, sweatpants, and ski shells, huddled together in the green lean-to emblazoned with Semmering Academy's scripted S. It had rained all morning and all afternoon; though the rain had temporarily ceased, the playing field remained a patchwork of brown grass and mud bordered by a rain-swept chalk line. Last month a Semmering wing had torn an ankle tendon in similarly poor conditions, but the referee refused to call the game until 4 p.m. because the preparatory school extracurricular activities rules and regulations handbook stipulated that "sporting events shall not be canceled due to weather until one hour past the official start time." At 3:37, the rain recommenced. The girls whined and shivered while Coach Betsy glowered beneath the brim of her umass crew baseball cap. These girls were not tough girls and they had little incentive, given their eight-game losing streak, to endure a rainy November afternoon. At 3:42, the girl asked Coach Betsy if she could be excused to the field house. The girl did not say, but she implied that she had her period. Coach Betsy nodded her reluctant permission. The girl departed from the lean-to, unnoticed by her teammates. *** Rain pattered over the grass as the girl traversed the empty field, her cleats suctioning in and out of the mud. She did not hurry. The man, she knew, would wait for her. Every afternoon the man parked across the street from the cemetery where she and her friends escaped after lunch to smoke cigarettes. At first they thought he was an undercover cop or a truant officer, someone hired by their headmaster Miss Pym to keep tabs on their forbidden roaming during school hours. But the man's car, a 1975 gray Mercedes, rendered this sus...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Heidi Julavits
• Editore: Anchor Books USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 08.01.2008
• EAN: 9781400078110
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7811-0
• Pagine: 368
• Dimensioni: 132 mm x 202 mm x 20 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi