Innocents and Others
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
‘Spiotta is a wonder.’ – George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler grew up together in Los Angeles, and both became film-makers.
Meadow makes challenging documentaries; Carrie makes successful feature films with a feminist slant. The two friends have everything in common - except their views on sex, power, movie-making and morality. And yet their loyalty trumps their different approaches to film and to life.
Until, one day, a mysterious woman with a unique ability to cold-call and seduce powerful men over the phone - not through sex, but through listening - becomes the subject of one of Meadow's documentaries. Her downfall, and what makes her so extraordinarily moving, is that she pretends to be someone she is not. The fallout from this challenges their friendship like nothing before.
Heart-breaking and insightful, Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta is an astonishing novel about friendship, identity, loneliness and art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spiotta (Stone Arabia) tackles the slippery nature of identity and the destructive pull of desire in her fourth novel this time through the lens of film. Having lived in Los Angeles since the 1980s, best friends Meadow and Carrie are both successful filmmakers, but their approach to art and life couldn't be more different. Married and strapped with a family, Carrie's films are breezy crowd-pleasers, while solo Meadow's searing documentaries pick at the scabs of their subjects' shortcomings. One of Meadow's early films tracks an outcast boy's disastrous experimentation with sex. Another of her "heavy, invisible, unremarkable" subjects is 41-year-old Jelly, aka Nicole whose sad but captivating backstory Spiotta explores over the course of sporadic chapters seduces Hollywood men over the phone but self-consciously vanishes when they ask to meet in person. As the book progresses, both women's lives spiral downward Carrie's home life is hollow, Meadow's self-destructive narcissism ends her career leaving neither fulfilled. Eschewing linear storytelling in favor of chapters interspersed with scene and interview transcripts and paragraphs of film theory, Spiotta delivers a patchwork portrait of two women on the verge of two very different nervous breakdowns. True to form, the effect is like watching raw footage before it's been edited sometimes moving, often disjointed, always thought provoking.
