Find Him!
A Novel
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
An uncanny novel which provides keen insight on patriarchal violence and female identity by the author of feminist cult classic The Princess of 72nd Street
With an introduction by Violet Kupersmith
Understand my beginning with Oliver. You will see that my love for him is not a romantic fantasy. Every bit of this love was formed from the reality of primary needs—ingestion, excretion, simple pleasure and pain.
Our narrator’s name and origins are unknown, but she claims to be from “another star.” Though she arrived as a fully grown woman, she did not yet have the ability to speak or look after herself. She lives with Oliver, who serves as both her caregiver and her captor and keeps the two of them in isolation from the rest of the world. Though she has no freedom, she insists that he did his best to protect her, to develop her into something more than she was.
Now she blends into our society, though she is still different at heart. The problem is, she can’t find Oliver. She goes back to their beginning to examine her relationship with him, a strange mix of father, lover, abuser, teacher.
And then there is the question of Edith, a mysterious woman whose absence seems to haunt them both.
Originally published in 1977 and seemingly woven from the fragments of nightmares and fantasies, Find Him! is a paragon of Elaine Kraf’s iconoclastic style, challenging and captivating in equal measure.
The Modern Library Torchbearers Series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kraf (The Princess of 72nd Street), who died in 2013, depicts in this striking 1977 novel the eccentric life of a mysterious unnamed woman who confesses she has "no identity, no ability to think or speak." In the beginning, she is taught to chew food by her oafish caregiver Oliver, whom she describes as her lover in ironic terms that reveal the limits of his affection ("There are some advantages to ignorance. Had I remembered other lovers I might have been dissatisfied"). He also regularly rapes her, calling her by the name of his long-since vanished wife, Edith. Early on, the narrator finds a cache of ominous letters Edith wrote to Oliver from a mental asylum ("I've gone for a walk and may not be here when you return"). Eventually, the letters, which appear throughout the novel, begin to suggest Edith received a prefrontal lobotomy and that the narrator is actually Edith ("When I come home I will not be able to do all the things I used to do"). The strangely affecting arc of the pair's twisted relationship lays bare the narrator's emotional needs and ultimate sense of betrayal. This entrancing novel more than withstands the test of time.
