The Theoretical Foot
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
When Robert Lescher died in 2012 an unpublished manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's was discovered neatly packed in the one of the literary agent's signature red boxes. Inspired by Fisher's affair with Dillwyn Parrish — who was to become her second husband — The Theoretical Foot is the master stylist's first novel. In it she describes the life she all–too–briefly had with the man she'd ever after describe as the one great love of her life.
It tells of a late–summer idyll at the Swiss farmhouse of Tim and Sara, where guests have gathered at ease on the terrace next to the burbling fountain in which baby lettuces are being washed, there to enjoy the food and wine served them by this stylish American couple.
But all around these seemingly fortunate people, the forces of darkness are gathering: The year is 1939; World War II approaches. And the paradise Tim and Sara have made is being besieged from within as Tim — closely based on Parrish — is about to suffer the first of the circulatory attacks that will cause him to lose his leg to amputation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The legendary and incantatory powers of description that earned Fisher (The Gastronomical Me) her fame as one of the 20th century's best prose writers are fully at work in this intricate novel, the discovery of which is almost as romantic a story as the couple at its center (the book was never published in her lifetime and was found in her late agent's effects in 2012). In late August 1938, an unmarried American couple, Tim Garton and Sara Porter, welcome to their lovely Swiss estate of La Prairie a number of expatriates. Their troubles, heartbreaks, worries, and triumphs coalesce around a party that, like the gathering war in the background, acquires undercurrents of tragedy. While points of view alternate among Sara's brother, Dan, and sister, Honor; Tim's literary sister, Nan, and her companion, Lucy; and the young lovers Joe and Susan all of whom are trying to escape some spell of love the contrapuntal vignettes of an anonymous man suffering agonies from an amputated leg make the wistful longings of the other characters seem dreamy by comparison. Tim and Sara are the steady, sphinx-like, yet essential pair, loosely based on Fisher and the "one true love" of her own life, who hold the others in orbit about them. Readers longing for the clever banter of Hemingway's characters or the indolent gloss of a Fitzgerald story will adore the book's modernist style, in which the action focuses on each passing thought, each turn of emotion, each detail of drink or cigarette with an extraordinary attention that makes the ordinary seem simultaneously bewildering, mysterious, and absurd. This is a worthy addition to the Fisher canon.
