Dra—
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A new edition of a classic of contemporary American literature, first published in 1997 by Sun & Moon Press but unavailable in recent years.
“Dra-, the nondescript heroine of this grim, hilarious fiction, might have fallen through the same hole as Lewis Carroll's Alice, only now, 130 years later, there's no time for frivolity, just the pressing need to get a job. In a sealed, modern Wonderland of "small stifled work centers, basements and sub-basements, night niches, and training hutches connected by hallways just inches across," Dra- seeks employment . . . This labyrinthine journey is brilliantly mimicked in the architecture of the prose. Levine creates cozy little warrens, small safe spaces made of short clear sentences, then sends the reader spiraling down long broken passages, fragmented by colons and semi-colons which give a halting, lurching gait to our progress. A quest, a comedy of manners, and a parable, Dra- is, above all else, a philosophical novel concerned with the most basic questions of living.”–Matthew Stadler, reviewing the original edition in The Stranger, 1997.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the dreamlike pace of Alice in Wonderland, the darkly comic tones of a Kafka novel and a landscape reminiscent of 1984, the latest installment in Sun & Moon's New American Fiction Series chronicles the nightmarish journey of Dra-, an infuriatingly passive woman of indeterminate age and name, as she searches for a clerical job in a labyrinthine gray city of the dystopian near future. The result is a novella that, for all its literary resonances, will frustrate rather than compel most readers. With a spirit as truncated as her name, Dra-- navigates a bureaucratic hell populated by anonymous, domineering administrators, secretaries and managers, all of whom subject Dra-- (and, unfortunately, the reader) to endless rants on humanity's degraded state. The bureaucrats also demand sudden intimacies from Dra--, who continually receives emotional outpourings from strangers (most of them high-level bureaucrats), as if to suggest that underneath our calm, professional facades, we're only "pretending to have a grand time!" Not a new idea--yet Levine's creepy, visceral images (excrement-filled dreams, obscene skin eruptions) find new manifestations for old angst. This is stomach-churning stuff--and mystifying, too. PEN-West Award winner Levine (My Horse and Other Stories) writes hauntingly, but her phantasmagoric prose may not be enough to convince readers to stick with what is too often a tedious, overly cryptic tale.
