Longing
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An intense psychological novel, this book focuses on a young woman’s dependence on her husband and her attempts to forge an independent life for herself. Rosa, a frail, sensitive American Jew living in Paris, marries an alcoholic expatriate from Chile and finds herself trapped in a sadomasochistic relationship. Amid a series of fast-moving events—the birth of their daughter, moving to Rosa’s parents’ home and then to Sausalito, California, and various sexual encounters—this narrative explores Antonio’s fears and failures as well as Rosa’s implicit trust in him to direct her life. Ultimately, Rosa begins to question her relationship with her husband and her parents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the early '60s, Rosa Bernstein from Long Island and her Chilean expatriate husband, Antonio, wander from Paris to New York to San Francisco, "in search of a novel to inhabit.'' Rosa is the quintessential victim, an unrealized actress, dancer and writer; Antonio is the evil touchstone, drunken, violent, insane, pimping, whose wit and perceptiveness are mentioned but never displayed. Unfortunately Longing often reads as though translated from another language, with awkward syntax (``A very sad blues was playing that slid into polyphony'') and off-the-mark colloquialisms (``Judith had lots of dollars''). All in all, the work seems unsatisfyingly mired in a late-'50s literary sensibility and early-'60s acid-head psychology and style.
