Life is Everywhere
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A multi-faceted, matryoshka doll of a novel which asks how far we ever able to understand ourselves. Manhattan, 2014. Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and her keys are at her parents' apartment, abandoned when she exited mid-dinner after her father - once again - lost control. Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she's written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who's recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn't sure what she's doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she's needed all along. With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives's latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, carry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ives (Cosmogeny) offers a discursive and funny Nabokovian story of academic stultification. Erin Adamo is a graduate student in New York City, where a recent scandal involving a relationship between one of her peers and faculty member Roger Herbsweet has rocked her school's department. Meanwhile, Erin's husband has just left her. After she accidentally locks herself out of her apartment, she takes refuge in the library. In her bag are three manuscripts—two short novels, authored by herself, and Herbsweet's profile of the enigmatic Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre, an imagined 19th-century French novelist and child of a Parisian courtesan, each of which Ives presents in their entirety before cutting back to Erin and her terrible night in the library, which, prompted by Herbsweet's text, sends her into a fit of mania. Holding together these layers are the theme of recursion and a hint of mystery. Erin's second novel, about the end of a marriage, presages the end of her own ("She had not known, and yet she had," Erin wrote of her protagonist). Meanwhile, in Herbsweet's pages, Ives nails the stuffy remove of academic diction, almost to the point of pain. Brave readers will enjoy piecing together the puzzle.
