All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction
In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She’s come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefèvre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He’s a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she’s the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist. Valerie’s thinking about Gerard on assignment in her native New York City, where their son Andre works. In New York City, an airplane has plunged into a skyscraper, and in the short time before anyone understands the significance of this event, Valerie’s mind begins to spiral in and out of the present moment, circling around her intense memories of her father’s death, her youthful relationship with troubled Matthew, and her pregnancy with his child, the crisis that led to her marriage to Gerard, and her fears for the safety of her son Andre and his partner James. Unable to reach her loved ones, Valerie finds memory intruding on a surreal and dreamlike present until at last she connects with Gerard and the final horror of that day.
"Has enough time passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for authors to render those tragic events into fiction? For readers left disappointed by hasty attempts from Dom DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Jonathan Safran Foer, this new work from Carole Giangrande may offer an enriching alternative. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air-- a title taken from a line in The Communist Manifesto--is at once a slow rumination of those horrific events and an intense, frighteningly accurate recreation of them." --Quill and Quire
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Giangrande (Midsummer) sensitively delves into the effects of the 9/11 attacks on one family. Valerie ventures from Toronto to the French island of St.-Pierre to contemplate her future, worrying that her 30-year marriage to Gerard, a freelance journalist, might be over. While on the island, she hears news of the World Trade Center attack. Gerard is on assignment in New York, and Valerie's son, Andre, and Andre's partner, James, both work in the WTC's ill-fated towers. Overcome by the situation, Valerie is thrust backward through the events of her life: her origins in New York, her first time meeting Gerard in Montr al at a time when each of them faced a tragedy he having lost his first love in the Swissair bombing of 1970, she having been abandoned while pregnant with her first child. Giangrande never uses the imagery of 9/11 for gratuitous shock, taking a somber tone as Valerie vacillates among confusion, horror, and self-deception while she waits surrounded to surreal effect by the mundanity of everyday life to hear of the fates of those closest to her. This is a softly unsettling book, effective in showcasing the confusion that follows such a personal yet public crisis, but it occasionally veers too far into esoteric, poetic detachment.