From Publishers Weekly
Katherine Shea, a highly intelligent 23-year-old, may be the most unusual protagonist in recent fiction. After returning from a self-guided year of study in Italy, Katherine takes up with Boris, a middle-aged Russian novelist. When her affair with Boris bores her, Katherine escapes to Maine and then to Arizona, where she finds a box of bones bequeathed to her by her deranged mother. She continues to travel, but everywhere she goes, the people she meets end up dying. Reader Hoopes captures Boris's dolorous Russian accent and also the Maine burr and Southern twang of Katherine's subsequent lovers. But her biggest achievement is Katherine, an untethered and unreliable narrator. Hoopes's subtle rendering of Katherine's wily intelligence is impressive given how much Katherine conceals while she ingenuously relates her story. As the book wanders into stranger territory, Katherine distracts her audience with long, scholarly asides about art, literature, history and mythology, all dealing with a common theme: cannibalism. Hoopes tackles these passages with ease, adopting a haughty French accent for Katherine's rendition of the
Tale of Bisclaveret and a macabre Italian voice for the
Inferno's Count Ugolino. That Katherine's great secret remains inscrutable until the very end is a testament to Hoopes's light-handed interpretation of this twisted tale.
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Pursuit of the flesh reaches prickly proportions in this seductive thriller by PEN/Faulkner-winner Murray. After a year spent in Italy, 23-year-old free spirit Katherine Shea returns to the U.S and begins an affair with Boris, an unremarkable, middle-aged Russian novelist. Restless within the relationship, Katherine ventures out on her own, encountering two men who meet violent ends: one, the victim of a serial killer who bit a chunk out of his prey's cheek; the other, savaged by a coyote as he slept in his truck. Intrigued and disturbed by the slayings, Katherine begins to ponder cannibalism in literature and art, from the rapacious Count Ugolino in Dante's
Inferno to the bloody tale behind Romantic painter Gericault's
The Raft of the Medusa. The string of murders continues, revealing the truth--and consequences--of Katherine's preoccupation with the perverse. "Were we not all cannibals," she asks, "dispensing with the defenseless, concerned only with our own survival?" Not for the easily queasy, this is a dark meditation on the vagaries that dwell beneath civilization's veneer.
Allison BlockCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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