Carrying the Body
A Novel
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably.
A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Denial of self leads to tragic but ultimately uplifting consequences for Aunt, the main character of Raffel's debut novel (after a well-received story collection, In the Year of Long Division), a terse examination of loss, strangling family relations and abuse. Spare, supple prose shapes this portrait of a woman held too long captive in a "haunted" house. Aunt has been the primary caregiver for her elderly father since her mother died and her sister, Elise, ran away, drawn by a train whistle's promise of freedom from her oppressive family. When a penniless Elise returns, accompanied by her sick son, James, she seeks something more than just refuge, and when she departs again, leaving the young boy in her sister's care, the alcoholic Aunt is overwhelmed with anger and despair. Can she forgo her gin to find the milk to nurture the hungry child? To do so, she must confront the riddle of another disturbing loss in her past. After much painful soul searching, she begins to hear "the sound of a woman awake in a house full of sleep" and learns that in order to escape the nightmare she must be strong enough to acknowledge it. If she can, she may save the child, whose mysterious illness makes him weaker with every passing day. She must also rediscover herself before it's too late. "The water seemed to enter her; she felt the warmth seeping. She lifted the washcloth ever so slightly. 'The body,' she said." Worthy prose poetry, for those who love extreme literature.
