- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Goose Lane Editions; No edition edition (April 1 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0864925158
- ISBN-13: 978-0864925152
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 14 x 1.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 318 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #392,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Quill & Quire
Toronto writer Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s second novel pivots on the character of Curtis Woolf, who flees his New Mexico home for Ontario, where he establishes up a religious commune known as the Family. Years later, Curtis’s lover, Martha, finds his gun and sets out to uncover the truth about him. This premise seems different from regular CanLit fare, and even sounds promising. Martha retraces what little she knows of Curtis’s assumed past as a draft dodger, crossing over the border into the U.S., where she follows his long-abandoned Mormon roots to his hometown. She encounters Hattie, the mistress of Hollis, Curtis’s father. The older woman shelters Martha, though Hattie’s illegitimate sons, men riddled with old wounds and grudges, believe her presence will pry open a nasty, 30-year-old can of worms, one which includes murder. All this should provide a delightful, squirmy mess in which to explore themes of devotion, betrayal, and reckoning. But from the outset, Kuitenbrouwer’s writing style is clearly unlike that of her well-crafted debut novel, The Nettle Spinner. Here, a heavy-handed, untamed prose subjugates the story. The overwriting disrupts the flow, as do the preponderance of passive verbs and rambling inner monologues. Passages with abrupt point-of-view shifts, awkward descriptions (“Colm’s corneas were like tunnels”; “His eyes were caked in sadness”), and pretzelled sentences (“There were all these things in the look she gave Martha, and by this look Martha was again made aware of that which she did not want to be made aware of”) intrude and confound. Dialogue rarely gels, rings true, or enlightens; sometimes it’s tough just to tell who’s speaking. Perfecting certainly is different. However, the ideas that manage to surface through the tangled prose – the ripple effects of abuse, war, fear, religion, guilt, love, and redemption – soon lose out to the effort required to navigate the writing’s bizarre overkill. Martha inadvertently sums up this problem when she asks, “Who can say what truth is?” A variation of this question preys on the reader’s mind: Who can say what this book was meant to be? In the end, the only thing that lingers is its exasperating imperfection.
Review
“An ambitious novel that satisfies. . . . Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s characters are searchers — for love, for nation, for a belief to actually believe in — and their author has found a vital prose with which to bring them to life. Perfecting is rich in insight and artistry, both line-by-line and as a whole.” — Andrew Pyper, author of The Killing Circle
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
How Evil Pays Forward,
By
This review is from: Perfecting (Paperback)
Perfecting is a fascinating (and perhaps essential) study of the damaged and the damned. How evil pays forward. How half-blind attempts to find personal redemption can go pathetically awry. In sinuous language that twines from the minds of her characters into the reader's own subconscious realms, Kuitenbrouwer lures us along taut story threads to a brilliantly executed moment of retribution -- and surprise.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
A powerful set-up that never quite delivers,
By
This review is from: Perfecting (Paperback)
Perfecting commences strongly, with striking characters all moving towards a dramatic collision with each other, against the backdrop of a looming storm. The shifting emotions of Martha, a woman who has spent most of her life in a cult but now feels compelled to leave it, are very well handled (as I can attest, having myself once left a cult after many years). The two most striking characters are Hollis, the aging patriarch of two families of angry men, and Curtis, one of Hollis' sons who tries to remake himself into a saint by founding a small cult in Ontario. The plot fairly demands that the two must ultimately meet again face to face, but here the reader is disappointed. The book's climax and resolution fail to deliver on the full dramatic potential of its powerful set-up.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
4.0 out of 5 stars
How Evil Pays Forward,
By Barbara Lambert - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Perfecting (Paperback)
Perfecting is a fascinating (and perhaps essential) study of the damaged and the damned. How evil pays forward. How half-blind attempts to find personal redemption can go pathetically awry. In sinuous language that twines from the minds of her characters into the reader's own subconscious realms, Kuitenbrouwer lures us along taut story threads to a brilliantly executed moment of retribution -- and surprise.
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