Stella Descending
A Novel
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
On a warm summer night in Oslo, Martin draws Stella into one of the risky games that have defined their ten years together: a balancing act on the edge of their rooftop, nine stories up.
"Exquisitely written. . . . As hallucinatory as August heat.” –The Washington Post
Amid the shouts of horrified onlookers, Stella stumbles, falling for a moment into Martin’s arms before plummeting to her death. (Did he try to save her?)
So begins Linn Ullmann’s transfixing tale of Stella—jealous wife, forbearing lover, angelic nurse, unloved daughter, devoted mother, and finally, a woman possessed of a secret now for-ever lost to the living. As Stella’s life unfolds in the recollections of those she has left behind, we observe the fabric of many lives unraveling. And as Stella herself bears witness from a place beyond death, we come to understand how precarious her life was behind its facade of loveliness and order.
With a quiet power, Stella Descending gives us the backlit dailiness—and the dark metaphysical underworld—of life in a fabled metropolis. And in brilliantly evoking the loneliness that haunts all our intimacies, it becomes a fable of life everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One part unsolvable mystery, one part modern fairy tale, Ullmann's second novel is a wonderfully strange follow-up to 1998's well-received Before You Sleep. In the early morning hours of August 2000 in Oslo, the "more beautiful than beautiful" Stella and her enigmatic husband, Martin, embrace on the roof just before she loses her precarious footing and falls to her death. The three eyewitnesses each with a curious connection to Stella and Corinne, the investigating officer, who has the ability to smell guilt, aim to decipher the nature of the embrace: was it Martin's failed effort to save his wife, or a successful attempt to push her? Among Stella's mourners are her two daughters, 15-year-old Amanda (who refers to Martin, her stepfather, as a "wicked sorcerer") and young Bee, whose birth inexplicably disturbed her father, Martin: "Sometimes I would get it into my head that the baby was evil." The mysteries are myriad: how did Martin and Stella feel about each other? What were their true intentions? Does Martin's penchant for bringing out the worst in people ("Other people's contempt is so easily aroused") preclude him from loving his wife? As the only character who doesn't take a turn narrating the story even Stella chimes in from beyond the grave he forfeits his chance to defend himself. Ullmann pairs her native Scandinavian starkness with playful prose often sexually graphic to peculiar, pleasing effect. The oddness may be off-putting at first, but once one enters Ullmann's hypnotic world, the reward is an emotionally rich and layered story about the elusiveness of truth.
