The Weeds
A Novel
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A Best Book of the Year at The New Yorker
A Must Read at The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Millions, and Garden & Gun
“[A] lyrical incisive novel . . . [about] a changing climate, the invisibility of women’s work, and the perseverance of unofficial histories.” —The New Yorker
In Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds, two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires.
A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, signed up to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.
In 1854, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. She is a thief, and she must find new ways to use her hands. If only the woman she loves weren’t on a boat, with a husband. But love isn’t always possible. She logs 420 species.
Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses—medical, agricultural, culinary—these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?
Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith revisits Rome, the setting of The Everlasting, with another sensuous and sprawling story of the Eternal City. In the 1850s, British botanist Richard Deakin sets about cataloging the flora of the Roman Colosseum. Smith focuses on Deakin's apprentice, an unnamed woman who is apprehended for burglary and lesbianism and forced by her father to help Deakin. The apprentice's chapters alternate with present-day entries from the point of view of an unnamed graduate student who is assisting her adviser in replicating Deakin's study. As the apprentice toils through her sentence, the student rues her lazy and mediocre adviser, a man who says "dumb things" like "Something is always blooming." The story unfurls, unhurriedly, in the form of an indexed list of vegetation from both narrators in which the entries serve as metaphors for the stifled women's respective predicaments. Of bitter-cress, for instance, Smith writes: "Picture a plant so sensitive, so f-ing heart-on-its-sleeve, that it built its seeds to explode in a shower of fireworks every time so much as the gentlest thrush wing brushes by." It's an ingenious device to connect these resilient characters across time, and to show how women can fall through the cracks and still flourish. There's not much narrative momentum, but the potent details bring this to vibrant life. Patient readers will enjoy stopping to smell the clematis.
