- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: GP Putnam And Sons (Jun 3 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0399150498
- ISBN-13: 978-0399150494
- Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 16.3 x 2.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 594 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,172,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The Effect of Living Backwards, Heidi Julavits's second novel, is a mess--but a good mess, an ambitious mess. The title is taken from Through the Looking-Glass, and Julavits's narrator--named Alice--certainly wanders into a perplexing wonderland. She and her sister Edith are flying to Morocco, where Edith is to be married. The plane is hijacked by a charismatic, chubby blind man named Bruno. After a time, the hijacking appears to be an extended moral case study: Bruno forces his hostages to consider whether they would give their own life to save another. The hijacking, it turns out, may or may not be real; Bruno may or may not be blind; Alice may or may not be falling in love with Pitcairn, the hostage negotiator who's supposed to save them all. As she unspools her black comedy, Julavits displays a wildly discursive style; the book can seem overwritten. But as her plot gains momentum, so too does Julavits's writing, and her tortuous sentences begin to make sense: they reflect the awkward situation of the heroine. After a supper of candy and punch, Alice tells us she and her fellow hostages "suffered extreme intestinal discomfort, which made the lavatories more unspeakably filth-ridden, and tempers, whose foulness is always proportional to the decrepitude of a WC, began to fester." On one level, this is an unhappy sentence; on another, its very contortions are funny. So it is with The Effect of Living Backwards, which, in its patience-trying elegance, recalls the underrated novelist Nancy Lemann. This is a brave novel, aggressively intelligent and aggressively silly all at once. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
When contentious half-sisters Alice and Edith board a jetliner en route to Morocco, where Edith is to be married, they step unknowingly into a vortex of international intrigue when the jet is hijacked-or is it? As events unfold, the motives for this act of "terrorism," apparently a high-stakes stunt being pulled by one of two factions from the International Institute for Terrorist Studies, become ever more murky. In the futuristic and fantastical world of Julavits's second novel (after The Mineral Palace), which takes its title and epigram from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the political and familial machinations we recognize from our own contemporary lives scramble into a kaleidoscopic puzzle. Julavits's rambling surrealism is overlaid and intensified by a strong dose of paranoia … la Pynchon, and the political and the familial merge in the form of a game from Alice and Edith's childhood called "shame stories," in which others are convinced to tell their darkest secrets. These tales, told by the sisters' fellow travelers, are fascinating excursions, a blend of the bizarre and the everyday. But as Alice's wastrel father tells her, "People don't want to be surprised. They want to hear the same story. Tell them the same story and they'll listen," and Julavits follows this advice herself. Beneath its absurdist trappings, her larger tale is surprisingly conventional, its real focus the sibling rivalry between Edith and Alice, shadowed by the terrorism subplots and the veiled references to September 11, or the "Big Terrible." Neither the novel's imaginative framework nor Julavits's cool, unerring eye for detail can quite compensate for its curiously mechanical emotional trajectory.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence
BUT LET ME DESCRIBE what Edith was wearing on that day we boarded Flight 919 from Casablanca to Melilla, where, fifty or so hours later, she was supposed to be married: a pale-blue cotton blouse with white threading and sanded wood buttons, an oatmeal wool skirt, a camel's-hair coat folded over her arm, cabled stockings, and a pair of sturdy leather schoolgirl shoes, because my sister believed in the erotic possibilities of cloddish, thick-knit, nubbled apparel. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
BUT LET ME DESCRIBE what Edith was wearing on that day we boarded Flight 919 from Casablanca to Melilla, where, fifty or so hours later, she was supposed to be married: a pale-blue cotton blouse with white threading and sanded wood buttons, an oatmeal wool skirt, a camel's-hair coat folded over her arm, cabled stockings, and a pair of sturdy leather schoolgirl shoes, because my sister believed in the erotic possibilities of cloddish, thick-knit, nubbled apparel. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good Ideas that Don't Take Off,
By A Customer
This review is from: Effect Of Living Backwards (Hardcover)
An ambitious book that ultimately bites off more then it can chew. Could the author be too much of a brainiac? There are lovely moments of texture and real insight, and then long insufferable passages where the author's strain is evident. A series of vignettes meant to expose the shameful secrets of the main characters fail because the secrets aren't, well, that shameful. The rivalry between the two sisters ends up repeating the same note over and over, squabbling leading to more squabbling. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the novel somehow does manage to land. The author does seem to have caught a side ways glace of much of what ails us, and the feeling you are left with at the end (an uneasy and ephemeral melancholy) may or may not be worth the read - it depends on your patience.
3.0 out of 5 stars
**Great Style, Good Characters, Confusing Story-line**,
By OhSayCanYouSee1 "ohsaycanyousee1" (Elmhurst, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Effect Of Living Backwards (Hardcover)
This novel is very different. The story premise is unusual, timely and interesting. It is a black comedy describing a pair of sisters involved in an airline hijacking experience. You never know if the hijacking is real, staged or something in between. I really wanted to love this book. There is so much promise in this writer. Her prose is amazing; she seems to understand and utilize words that sound almost musical in her sentences. I found myself looking to the dictionary on multiple occasions, fascinated with the vocabulary and syntax. Unfortunately, the plot and story development, do not demonstrate the same level of maturity. Author Heidi Julavits' shows she has extraordinary potential, having a remarkable ability to piece together interesting phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. If the plot of this novel was more substantial, or the two sister's characters were better developed, this would be a very good work. Instead, we are left with an interesting book, that leaves you puzzled about what you read when you reach the finish. I generously rate this book at 2.75 out of 5.00 stars, rounded up to 3.00, for beautiful use of language, creativity in subject matter and a nice job in approaching the story. However, it rambles on in its linguistic beauty instead of really delivering a strong plot or climax. If this writer learns to finish as well as she starts, I believe we will see many other interesting works to come.
1.0 out of 5 stars
(...),
By lady detective "sakura kitty" (east coat) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Effect Of Living Backwards (Hardcover)
what a messy, mess, mess this book is! there's a/are terrorist(s) on board a plane- but the reader is let in on the beginning that the terrorism isn't real- in fact there's some strange school where people are trained to act out fake terrorist attacks-- for what purpose? who knows. oh, the narrator hints at this & that- the author lets us into the other passenger's minds briefly in these small interjected chapters- why? once again, who knows? you really never know what the heck is going on- people die- but do they really? relationships take on a joking manner that only the author seems privvy to. oh my gosh! the only reason i finished the darn thing was due to a (wrong) belief that all of the confused nonsense would work itself out in the end. do yourself a favor & don't bother with this book.
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