Estate
A Novel
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- 85,00 kr
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- 85,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.
Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. In these propulsive pages, Caroline herself speaks during a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe she and Lorenzo tell each other—but how true are any of them? Not a sequel to Cynthia Zarin's Inverno but an astounding mirror image in which revelations and responsibilities collide, Estate is a tight, compressed tour de force that sweeps across time and space, from New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, bringing to mind Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante, charting the exigencies of desire—and asking how can a person disappear in a hall of stories and reflections?
Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, “To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art.” In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The elegant latest from Zarin offers a new and seemingly autofictional version of the love story central to her previous novel, Inverno. Caroline, the narrator, has recently separated from her husband, Daniel, in New York City, and fallen inconveniently in love with her longtime friend Lorenzo, an Italian who himself is involved with two other women. Zarin reflects Caroline's head-spinning emotional state in the novel's form, a choppy series of digressions and vignettes, most of which are addressed to Lorenzo. Among Caroline's preoccupations are her interest in the nature of disappearance, and she muses on the story of Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of Nelson Rockefeller who vanished in New Guinea in 1961 when his father was governor of New York. Caroline's preteen daughter, Pom, her youngest, appears repeatedly, while other minor characters float through the novel, including her three older children, as Caroline ricochets around Manhattan and reflects on trips to Europe, literature, art, her years with Daniel, and other lovers. The fleeting and kaleidoscopic images don't all cohere into a narrative, but Zarin's lucid writing impresses, especially when the author has Caroline taking stock of her situation, describing herself as a "woman who cannot love anyone unless she is backing herself into an abyss." This slim tale gives readers plenty to chew on.
