Customer Reviews

The Lie: A Novel

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The book is a short one. About 200 pages long. It covers the life of Ramona Smollens. She didn't have much of a life to begin with. Her father treated her horribly. Her mother didn't care and was more concerned about herself. She lives with her mother, as her father had recently passed away. Yet her mother still treats her like dirt. So, in order to get away from this she married an older man; Solomon Columbus. Thinking married life is as glamorous as they make it out to be in Hollywood, Ramona emulates starlet Rita Hayworth. It isn't until later when she realizes that married life and everything else with it, and that it isn't how the movies say it is. She then sees that everything she's tried to imitate is all part of "the lie".

It's hard to describe how I felt while reading The Lie by Fredrica Wagman. It was strange. It's in first person narrative yet you're reading through her stream of thoughts. They're all jarbled and they fleet from one thing to another. It's hard to make out the dialogue and then you suddenly realize she's talking to herself (not out loud, but talking to herself mentally). It's difficult to get used to at first. I think it's because there's so much use of the hyphens and everything is just all a mess. I think what's trying to be done is to show how much of a mess Ramona is inside, whereas on the outside she's different.

As you go further into the novel where she really starts acting irrational, you start to wonder what's real and what's not. At this point, I try to make out what's really going on through this story, and even now I'm still not sure but I got the general idea. As you look into Ramona's relationship with her mother (which isn't that great but Ramona puts up with it). Now, her mother is a selfish uncaring person, she's also one of those evil old vipers you sometimes see on television, who are so narcissistic you just want to leave them locked in a room filled with mirrors and they'd probably be happy for the rest of their lives. However, as you get to know her mother through the eyes of Ramona, and towards the end of the story, you start to see that Ramona inevitably starts becoming more like her mother. It's actually rather horrible to see.

Overall an interesting read, albeit rather difficult to get into and I had a rather hard time following. Although the ending is sad and unexpected, you're left feeling rather sober and serious.

On Wikipedia the 'stream of consciousness' literary tool is defined as:

"...a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions."

While it's not a device that I'm fond of reading, Fredrica Wagman has some good company. James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson (who was said to have created the technique) and Virginia Woolf have all used it. I think it can't be easy to write - the author has to keep track of where her story is going in a way the reader doesn't have to worry about. The reader is led along on the journey of the character's thought processes and one hopes an ending will eventually be reached.

And so it was with The Lie. The first page contains one of the most interesting and (I thought) humourous descriptions of someone's fingers I've ever read:

"...- his fat peasant hands that were almost like primitive art - each shocking finger round and wide at the base, but instead of getting slightly narrower as it progressed like most fingers do, it kept all its fat round wideness all the way up to the nail where there was a certain unusual thickening...a rather bulbous thickening you might say all around the nail head itself, so that each finger looked exactly like a penis...and there were ten of them...ten perfect penis fingers...I couldn't take my eyes away."

There are more descriptions like this one and I often re-read them just for the enjoyment of it. The Lie begins with Ramona Smollens sitting on a park bench one afternoon. She falls into conversation with the owner of the fingers and soon after that into bed. Finding freedom with Solomon Columbus after the death of her father, an oppressive, abusive man and her mother, who is mentally unstable, Ramona strives to find her way using the cult of film stars as a guide. However she begins to questions herself when she is not bowled over by Solomon as she believes she should be. Everything Ramona is and everything she does is compared to Rita Hayworth and how the film start would behave given similar situations.

The Lie is a slim novel and an easy book to read - the prosaic flow of words leads from one page to the next and before I knew it I'd finished the book. I found the premise unique and many descriptions quite vivid. And, as mentioned, though I'm not a fan of the 'stream of consciousness' literary device, it didn't bother me too much in this instance. Occasionally, I found there were too many uses of hyphens and ellipses, maybe a necessary tool when using this method of writing, but I found that it broke up the flow of the story a bit. Otherwise I enjoyed The Lie and would recommend it as a very interesting and unique view of a young woman's perspective of how to find herself in a world of ideals.