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Described on its jacket as resembling "a Russian Doll", Helen Dunmore's
Mourning Ruby is certainly more of an assemblage of interconnected tales than a full novel. It's a work that plays the old "stories within stories" game; there are quotes from poems (Mandelstam, Byron, Dickinson and some of Dunmore's own pieces) and folk songs and nearly the last third of the book is given over to shards of a novel in progress written by one of the characters. As in
Talking to the Dead and
With Your Crooked Heart, the main protagonists here--Rebecca, her husband Adam, and Joe, her old flatmate, a Stalin-obsessed writer--form another of Dunmore's intriguing sexual/sibling triangles.
As the title confirms though, it's the death of Rebecca and Adam's child, Ruby, in a road accident that dominates. In the depiction of this horrific incident, Dunmore at one point breaks into verse, crystallising in just a few sparse, stream of consciousness lines Rebecca's agony as, impotently, she watches the tragedy unfold: "She always stops at roads, she's never run into a road, but look how fast she's going Adam, she's too far ahead, the gap between them, stop Ruby, stop Ruby, stop Rubystop."
Rebecca's loss is even greater because she is herself a lost child, a foundling who was abandoned in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. But, if this is a book about the many permutations of loss, it is equally about creativity, artistic as well as biological. Through Rebecca's encounters with her boss, Mr Damiano, the former circus impresario turned hotelier, and Joe's "story", Dunmore salutes, through the very medium of fiction itself, the healing power of the imagination. --Travis Elborough
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From Publishers Weekly
When Rebecca, the narrator of most of Dunmore's fine, almost unbearably sad eighth novel (after 2003's Ice Cream), shares a flat with Joe in London, she begins to enjoy the pleasures of friendship and family for the first time in her life: she was abandoned as a baby and adopted by a couple remarkably unsuitable for parenting. Joe, a historian interested in Stalin, introduces her to simple pleasures and shows her that loneliness need not be permanent. And it's through Joe that she meets Adam, a neonatologist who becomes her husband and the father of their daughter, Ruby ("For the first time, I was tied to someone by blood"). Given the book's title, Ruby's death is no surprise (though it's still heartbreaking without being melodramatic), and Dunmore plumbs the consequences of loss: How does one mourn, and then accept, the unacceptable? Numbed by Ruby's death, Rebecca drifts away from Adam, finding diversion in a job as an assistant to a hotelier, Mr. Damiano; Adam buries himself in his work with premature babies. Ambitiously, Dunmore complements this tragic narrative with two other stories, one autobiographical, told by Mr. Damiano, about growing up in a circus where his parents were trapeze artists, and one told by Joe, a work of fiction set during WWI about a man and a woman who could be his and Rebecca's ancestors. Rebecca's own story isn't told linearly, so these narrative asides aren't as distracting as they sound. And they are critical to the author's main theme: that narrative is a key to understanding and to acceptance. This is that rare novel, an intensely emotional, fiercely intelligent story, fiction with the power to offer redemption.
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