- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Knopf Canada; 1st Edition edition (Mar 7 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676977480
- ISBN-13: 978-0676977486
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 14.1 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 358 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,323,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
Praise for The Shape I Gave You:
“The Shape I Gave You is a richly evocative story about Ulrike, a musician trapped in the recurring themes of her father's adultery. She is forced to exhume dead loves and lives in this sophisticated novel about how the past haunts the present.”
–Sandra Martin, Elle Canada
“[An] old-fashioned quality . . . gives Baillie’s work its charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history. . . . Baillie’s made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown. She’s also shown that with each new novel her voice becomes stronger.”
–NOW (Toronto)
“[T]he story pleasantly seduces you. . . . There are so many strengths . . . [The Shape I Gave You] does what the best novels do: it not only takes you deep into the characters and their beliefs and preoccupations, it makes you reflect on the choices you made in your own life.”
–Winnipeg Free Press
“[W]e put down the book commending Baillie not only for the poetic grace of her prose, but for her masterful delivery of an exquisite plot twist. . . . The novel’s precise, multi-faceted construction includes astute commentary upon the nature of letter-writing and of literature . . . This is a novel to savour rather than devour. Essentially monogamous people plagued by a singular adulterous temptation of the nostalgic kind will want to send Baillie a thank you note, for understanding.”
–The Gazette (Montreal)
"Haunting…. What would you do in such a situation, with no one to unburden your heart to? The best novels pose such compelling moral questions, and this is a very good novel. . . . A literary style that occasionally echoes both Anne Michaels and Elizabeth Smart. . . . Full of finely wrought detail. . . . These are grown-up thoughts and this is a grown-up, rather European-feeling novel."
–Bronwyn Drainie, Quill & Quire
Praise for Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment:
“What I would give to be invited to a soiree in Madame Balashovskaya's apartment.....Baillie gives richness to these lives in a book filled with beautiful writing.”
–The Globe and Mail (Laura Robinson)
“....the portrait of Eugenie is a heart stopping evocation of a life's slow fade.....Baillie conveys both the beauty and the beastliness of the rain-soaked metropolis, its café culture and the pointed ambitions of its intelligentsia, in what turns out to be a nugget of a novel.”
–Now (Toronto), Susan G. Cole
Praise for My Sister Esther:
“....impressive for its language, superb characterization and almost quiet desperation of day to day living... Baillie gives us a sincere, unpretentious novel that impresses, even haunts.” Rob McLennan, Ottawa X Press
“The Shape I Gave You is a richly evocative story about Ulrike, a musician trapped in the recurring themes of her father's adultery. She is forced to exhume dead loves and lives in this sophisticated novel about how the past haunts the present.”
–Sandra Martin, Elle Canada
“[An] old-fashioned quality . . . gives Baillie’s work its charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history. . . . Baillie’s made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown. She’s also shown that with each new novel her voice becomes stronger.”
–NOW (Toronto)
“[T]he story pleasantly seduces you. . . . There are so many strengths . . . [The Shape I Gave You] does what the best novels do: it not only takes you deep into the characters and their beliefs and preoccupations, it makes you reflect on the choices you made in your own life.”
–Winnipeg Free Press
“[W]e put down the book commending Baillie not only for the poetic grace of her prose, but for her masterful delivery of an exquisite plot twist. . . . The novel’s precise, multi-faceted construction includes astute commentary upon the nature of letter-writing and of literature . . . This is a novel to savour rather than devour. Essentially monogamous people plagued by a singular adulterous temptation of the nostalgic kind will want to send Baillie a thank you note, for understanding.”
–The Gazette (Montreal)
"Haunting…. What would you do in such a situation, with no one to unburden your heart to? The best novels pose such compelling moral questions, and this is a very good novel. . . . A literary style that occasionally echoes both Anne Michaels and Elizabeth Smart. . . . Full of finely wrought detail. . . . These are grown-up thoughts and this is a grown-up, rather European-feeling novel."
–Bronwyn Drainie, Quill & Quire
Praise for Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment:
“What I would give to be invited to a soiree in Madame Balashovskaya's apartment.....Baillie gives richness to these lives in a book filled with beautiful writing.”
–The Globe and Mail (Laura Robinson)
“....the portrait of Eugenie is a heart stopping evocation of a life's slow fade.....Baillie conveys both the beauty and the beastliness of the rain-soaked metropolis, its café culture and the pointed ambitions of its intelligentsia, in what turns out to be a nugget of a novel.”
–Now (Toronto), Susan G. Cole
Praise for My Sister Esther:
“....impressive for its language, superb characterization and almost quiet desperation of day to day living... Baillie gives us a sincere, unpretentious novel that impresses, even haunts.” Rob McLennan, Ottawa X Press
Product Description
The night before she leaves to give a recital in another city, Ulrike Huguenot, a young pianist, arrives at her Berlin apartment planning to spend a relaxing evening there. Instead, she finds, stuffed in her mailbox, an unexpected and unwelcome letter. It is from Beatrice Mann, a Canadian sculptor, a friend of her father, Gustave, and also, Ulrike believes, his lover. What could this woman possibly have to say to her? And why now, seven years after her father’s death?
“I’m writing to you because my daughter has died,” begins Beatrice’s extraordinary letter of confession. Her only child, Ines, has been killed at the age of eighteen, and Beatrice has closed herself in her Toronto studio. Unable to speak openly with her grieving husband, Isaac, she turns to Ulrike, a young woman she barely knows. While she retells, and possibly reshapes, the past – her obsession with the exacting and complex Gustave, and her relationship with her elusive, now vanished, daughter – Isaac sets out on a journey of his own.
As Ulrike reads about Beatrice’s life and Gustave’s role in it, she reluctantly revisits the world of her own memories and starts to see her present in an altered light.
In The Shape I Gave You, acclaimed novelist and poet Martha Baillie explores the complex relationships between parents and children, men and women, to create a novel of spare elegance that gives piercing insight into the nature of confession and how we choose who to ask for absolution.
“I’m writing to you because my daughter has died,” begins Beatrice’s extraordinary letter of confession. Her only child, Ines, has been killed at the age of eighteen, and Beatrice has closed herself in her Toronto studio. Unable to speak openly with her grieving husband, Isaac, she turns to Ulrike, a young woman she barely knows. While she retells, and possibly reshapes, the past – her obsession with the exacting and complex Gustave, and her relationship with her elusive, now vanished, daughter – Isaac sets out on a journey of his own.
As Ulrike reads about Beatrice’s life and Gustave’s role in it, she reluctantly revisits the world of her own memories and starts to see her present in an altered light.
In The Shape I Gave You, acclaimed novelist and poet Martha Baillie explores the complex relationships between parents and children, men and women, to create a novel of spare elegance that gives piercing insight into the nature of confession and how we choose who to ask for absolution.
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