- Paperback: 248 pages
- Publisher: Coach House Books; 1 edition (April 15 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 155245195X
- ISBN-13: 978-1552451953
- Product Dimensions: 19.1 x 12.9 x 2.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#144,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #87 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Mothers & Children
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
'This surrealist coming-of-age novel – a shot of Catcher in the Rye with a One Hundred Years of Solitude chaser – is the perfect vehicle for Dey's caustic wit and trenchant observations. Perhaps it's the playwright in her, but Dey's powers of description are formidable. It's as if poet Anne Carson and satirist Mordecai Richler accidentally collided at a drunken PEN fundraiser to produce a mischievous, magical and observant girl-child.' – Toronto Star
'Dey's ... prose [is] a wondrous compression of poetry, her carnival of characters drawn in gripping detail, and the riot of fantastical yet gritty imagery all shot through with a keen and relentless sadness. The sheer density of the imagery and vivid characterizations makes you slow down to enjoy every sentence. You want to read this novel carefully; you want to read it again.' – The Globe and Mail
'Stunt is mesmerizing, rewarding, and breathtaking. Dey never lets up.' – Quill & Quire
Book Description
Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: “Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole.” Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised he’ll one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata.
After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way.
Stunt is the first novel by one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Dey’s words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moving between Two Points,
This review is from: Stunt (Paperback)
Stunt as a story is almost literally a dark night of the soul, a journey from shattering grief through progressively more mature and complex disappointments to a tender, wise and precarious hope. It begins at night, "the dead centre of it", and ends in the light of dawn.When Eugenia, the girl-hero, loses the anchor that is her vanishingly complex father, she trawls through Toronto's homely and redolent wash, sharply and humorously drawn, with a stubborn need to find meaningful purchase on some odd and forgiving shore. Viscerally, palpably concrete yet open, logical and surreal, this fine book performs the very life-preserving, faith-leaping high wire act that it describes. The late philosopher Robert Nozick once wrote of "our fundamental connection to the world" as "one of relation and trust." A dream, at its best, makes a revelation of this connection, pins open one's defenseless being to its own remorseless truths: this is what I am, here is what I really need and want from them, that reaction is the thing I fear most in the world, or desire greater than riches. Stunt is in this way a fiercely accurate, harrowing and beautiful, sustained and consistent, dream. One wakes from it, but cannot forget.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Chaotic, stylized, and vividly real, this is an understandably obscure book but still a remarkable one. Recommended,
By Juushika - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Stunt (Paperback)
When her father abandons the family leaving just a note behind, nine-year-old Eugenia begins a journey--through sudden adulthood, in search of her father, towards their tightrope-walking ancestor. Magical realism on a Toronoto landscape, Stunt is a tale of the half-believable strangeness of personal experience on the fringes of suburban life. Dey's voice is abrupt and image-laden, a near opposite of lyrical prose; instead it mirrors transcribed spoken poetry, and while that style can initially be difficult, it develops a strong and easily-internalized rhythm: at first the book seems strange, but after a hundred pages it's the outside world which seems strange, and simple, and arrhythmic. Stunt approaches its subject matter as though in a dream, but defines it with nuance and intricate, private detail; the combination is something like portraiture, sketched here, painstakingly detailed there, creating a complete image which is convincing not despite, but because, of its stylization. It's not a flawless achievement, and obscurely dense paragraphs, underexplored elements, and offputting aspects linger. But in many ways Stunt reminds me of Haven Kimmel's Iodine, another obscure and strange novel about one woman's bizarre life: it surprises me not at all that Stunt is all but unknown, and I doubt that a United States release would change that; both stranger and more normal than it seems, it will find a small audience and sometimes hold even them at a distance. But Stunt is also remarkable. In an age overflowing with suburban angst, this is something different: a liminal view of almost-normal life, strange and inexplicable, and at its best defiantly real. Eugenia walks tightropes, and so does her book: it's an uneasy journey, a dangerous one, but the view (hers, and ours) is beautiful. I'm glad I was pointed towards this book, and recommend it in turn.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book to linger over,
By Lynda Simmons - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Stunt (Paperback)
Stunt is not a quick, easy read. This is a book that makes you slow down, take your time and savour every word and image. It's a book you'll read again and again, taking away something new each time. Fabulous.
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