Negative Space
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
While sitting on a French terrace overlooking a three–hundred–year–old olive grove at sunset, a man listens as his wife confesses her love for someone else. Preparing to leave after twenty years of marriage, she details her erotic and emotional life, a confession that leaves her husband spent but delirious with love for her. The imminent loss of the passion of his life leads him to experience the power of desire, grief, and flushed obsession—and thus begins this riveting monologue at the end of a marriage, one that is mesmerizing with anger and regret.
Entirely alive in these intense moments, the husband examines every experience, every feeling that floods his mind with grief and anticipation. And this need, this experience, becomes one of absolute truth, as the story itself becomes composed of complicating love and loss.
Negative Space joins Steiner's earlier fictions—such as Bathers, Dread, and The Catastrophe—in evoking the dark texture and brilliant detail of erotic loss. The result is an exploration of heartbreak and sexual obsession the reader will not soon forget.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steiner's novella traces, in elegant, obsessive detail, the dissolution of the narrator's marriage of 20 years over the course of one evening after his wife confesses that she has been unfaithful. As they sit on a French terrace overlooking an ancient olive grove, she lays out every contour of her infidelity. As he listens, the passionate life they've shared ("a ravenous love between us and an empathy in the face of fear and failure") is upended. She steps away and for more than 60 pages he reflects intensely on his every memory, erotic and banal; every emotion, rarefied and debased; every assumption, na ve and jaded. He dwells on their shared erotic life and looks starkly ahead to a passionless future in which "deserting our marriage had caused me to become a victim of the meaning of life." He still loves his wife but sees his life as effectively over. "Searching desperately for the woman I thought my wife had been, I found the door to the universe open like a canyon." Through its articulate and painfully nuanced first-person narration, Steiner's examination of jealousy and betrayal at its simplest becomes something sublime.
