Bitter Water Opera
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An electrifying debut novel about art, solitude, family, and faith in a world without it
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.
In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.
Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta—the example of her single-minded, solitary life—enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.
In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman adrift is visited by the spirit of a reclusive dancer in this enchanting debut novel from Polek (after the collection Imaginary Museums). Gia, fresh from a breakup and on leave from her job at a college film department, writes a letter to the late Marta Becket after stumbling upon photos of her in a library archive. In response, Marta, who painted and performed mostly in solitude in an abandoned opera house, mysteriously appears at Gia's house. Together, the two attend a ballet, visit the estate of a local painter, and watch The Red Shoes. After Marta paints herself into a mural in Gia's garage, she disappears, and Gia moves on to a stint tending to a former professor's cottage. Strange things occur on the grounds: Gia encounters a dead deer in the pond, and, while walking in a field, she feels crushed by a large, shapeless darkness. Later, while visiting Marta's opera house in Amargosa, Calif., Gia has a profound spiritual experience during a drive through Death Valley and feels "God's touch." Polek writes with an enjoyably strange spareness and the descriptions are often pleasantly odd: "Marta made me spaghetti for lunch. I curtsied before she sat down. She didn't notice." Readers will be eager to see where Polek goes next.
