Rapture
-
- $139.00
-
- $139.00
Descripción editorial
A powerful, sensuous new novel from the critically acclaimed author of ‘Evening’.
'Mesmerising.' Vogue
'The bedspread was sloughing off the foot of the bed, the white sheets were as flat as paper. This is not what she'd pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn't.'
Taking one single interlude – two bodies entwined on a bed at midday, lovers rekindling an old affair – Susan Minot's new novel chronicles a relationship from the alternating perspectives of a man and a women.
Thoughts cascade through Benjamin's mind, memories of the chest thumping moment when he first met Kay; of the night they shared under the mosquito net on the pink bed in Oaxaca; and of his fiancé, Vanessa, and the simple choices that face him. Memories unspool in Kay's mind too. She recalls the dangerous lure of Benjamin, the man who drove her scepticism away; the dread and the thrill of the first night they spent together; and now she asks herself, how has she let him slip back into her life like this?
Graphic, provocative and reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi ‘Intimacy’, Susan Minot's striking novel dissects a love affair in breathtaking detail.
Reviews
'Mesmerising.' Vogue
'Few novels capture so delicately the bittersweet ambiguities of love.' Esquire
'Susan Minot's third novel makes painfully honest reading for anyone who's ever fallen for the wrong man. Unsettling and beautifully written.' She
'Susan Minot is a precise and accomplished writer, and Rapture is a handsome artefact, combining fine attention to physical detail with a keen sense of the evasions and queasy half-truths of lust and attraction.' Sunday Telegraph
'Minot writes very well about the bad faith and special pleading that attend the break-up of an affair, and about the way that love can turn into obsession. The rigid formal constraints that she has imposed upon herself only sharpen the intensity of the writing.' The Times
‘A brilliant new novel which strips bare the complexities of love …A haunting tale of love lost which will leave a mark long after you've turned the page.’Glasgow Evening Times
'A brilliantly observed account of a doomed love affair. Witty and unusual.' Sunday Express, Read of the Week
About the author
Susan Minot is the author of ‘Evening Monkeys’, Lust and Other Stories’ and ‘Rapture’. She lives in New York City and Maine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Minot's new novella, set on the fringes of the film world, addresses one of her perennial themes, the different meaning men and women give to passion. Thirty-four-year-old Kay Bailey, a film production designer, has an affair with director Benjamin Young while they are shooting a film in Mexico. Benjamin, however, is engaged to Vanessa Crane, the girlfriend who has seen him through the ups and mostly downs of his filmmaking career. When Kay and Benjamin return to New York City, she tries to end the affair. But he is persistent, and what was casual becomes serious for Kay. All of this is narrated during one act of sex as, in alternating interior monologues, the two recall the events that have led to this moment. Engaged as they are, they do not speak; the landscape of their sex is entirely in their imaginations, and they could not imagine it more differently. While Kay comes to exalt the moment, Benjamin reveals himself as a cad, his life on the skids. Minot (Monkeys; Lust; Evening) has a great ear for the callow way people talk, scrupulously mimicking their groping thoughts and at times making a poetry of their inarticulateness: "She sort of sidewise conjured up a semidomestic arrangement tilting away from the totallyconventional one she'd experienced with her parents." Moreover, Minot doesn't hide her characters' pretentiousness, as when Benjamin envisions his weak will as an "unfixable blot of doom" or Kay feels "altered in some big nameless way." All of which should add up to great satire, but Minot's novella is satiric only intermittently. She seems to take Kay's beatification seriously; even Benjamin is granted a cascade of sad and heroic images near his climax. The book is an odd amalgam, at times a smart satire, at times a way-we-live-now portrayal of 30-something life. Other times it just, well, sort of strains credibility.
