Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | LP FICTION HAL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | LP FICTION HAL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A National BestsellerA Whiting Award WinnerA New York Times Notable BookA New York Times Top 10 BookA Time Top 10 BookA Times Critic's Top BookNamed One of the Best Books by Elle, Bustle, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Shelf AwarenessTold in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly," tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, "Folly" also suggests an aspiring novelist's coming-of-age. By contrast, "Madness" is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
This thrilling novel about a relationship between an ageing writer and a young woman explores the uses of creativity So. Miss Alice. Are you game? The question is posed by an eminent novelist of about 70, who has sat on a Manhattan park bench and struck up conversation with a young woman reading a book. It sounds like the beginning of another #MeToo story, and Lisa Halliday s striking debut is certainly as the title implies a sharp examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women, innocence and experience, fame and aspiration. Through its fractured structure and daring incompleteness, it also explores the unreliability of memory, the accidents of history and the exercise and understanding of creativity. Most of all, it wonders whether we can ever penetrate the looking-glass of our own personality to imagine another consciousness a question as relevant to human relationships as it is to novel writing. Twentysomething Alice works in publishing, so is instantly in awe of this old man offering her chocolate with a trembling hand. He is world-famous writer Ezra Blazer, a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday had a relationship in her 20s. The Lewis Carroll references are intentional: this Alice is also struggling to progress through a confusing, surreal world. She finds herself jumping down a rabbit hole or, rather, into a lift up to Ezras apartment, worrying more than a little about what was going to happen next and embarking on a tricky, tender affair in which the rules are inevitably set by him. He summons her by phone, appearing always as CALLER ID BLOCKED, then sings The partys over when he wants her to leave. He gives her presents that range from the sweets of his youth to rolls of hundred-dollar bills via bagloads of improving books (Its Ca-MOO, sweetheart. Hes French). She calls him cradlerobber; he calls her graverobber. The medical complications are hair-raising. Throughout all this, though Alice is the narrative focus, the reader has very little insight into her feelings. We are left to assume, from her scrutiny and destruction of Polaroids Ezra takes of her, the standard amount of self-loathing typical of a young woman, her helpless immaturity. This scrupulously withholding tone enables some deliciously fertile ambiguities. Early on, Ezra gives her a lesson to countermand the endless female impulse to apologise: Darling, dont continually say Im sorry. Next time you feel like saying Im sorry, instead say Fuck you. When they later clash over the predictable difficulties of their asymmetric relationship, her Fuck you has a delicately devastating irony. The novel is mostly set at the opening of the century, around the US invasion of Iraq. Its first section ticks off the years through the Nobel prizes Ezra misses out on: Blazer! You were robbed! yells a man in the street when Elfriede Jelinek wins in 2004. It tacks close to reality, containing not only Nobel citations but passages from the classic authors Ezra urges on Alice: Camus, Henry Miller, Primo Levi. Theres another asymmetry here, between the canon and the debutante, between histories of Auschwitz and a Manhattan comedy of manners. Slabs of text from medicine packets and abortion clinic leaflets add to a sense of the overwhelming variousness of historical and literary experience a pack of cards threatening to bury would-be writer Alice, who is starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man. Then theres Ezra looming in the foreground, and the anxiety of influence: And, hadnt he already said everything she wanted to say? The second and third sections do not exactly answer this question, but consider it from different angles. In the second Amar, an Iraqi American detained at border control in London, looks back on his life. The final section is a ridiculously convincing transcript of a Desert Island Discs interview with Ezra in 2011, by which time he has at last bagged a Nobel (Halliday borrows Mario Vargas Llosa s, awarded in 2010). That Halliday can write part of her book in the voice of Kirsty Young, and pull it off, is one of the many surprises here. Can we escape our own perspective? If not, what are the risks? What is art for, and how do we fit our lives around it? Amars section is more complicated and indeed, its meant to complicate things. Where we read between the lines of Ezra and Alices zippy dialogue to intuit the shifting tides of emotion between them, Amar is a more traditionally forthcoming narrator. He wants to convey the experience of growing up in the US in an immigrant family, of trips to Baghdad, first loves and first jobs. He translates Arabic phrases for us and uses his medical training to muse on genetics; he wrestles sincerely with questions of time, memory and identity, drawing on a wide literary hinterland that suggests hes read all those books Ezra bought for Alice, and more. He notes that we are all different people at different times and in different places youth and adulthood, America and Iraq, ones diary and ones head but he cannot escape the accident of his birth, trapping him in a story of violence and war. Can any of us escape our own perspective? What are the risks, if we do not? What is art for, and how do we fit our lives around it? This is a debut asking a dizzying number of questions, many to thrilling effect. That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success. - Justine Jordan.
New York Review of Books Review
In "Asymmetry," two seemingly unrelated sections are connected by a shocking coda. The first, "Folly," is the story of a love affair. It narrates the relationship between Alice, a book editor and aspiring writer in her mid-20s, and Ezra Blazer, a brilliant, geriatric novelist who is partly modeled on Philip Roth. The second section - "Madness" - belongs to Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi- American economist who is being detained at Heathrow. Halliday's prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald. This is a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years, and it manages to be, all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction. THE GREAT BELIEVERS By Rebecca Makkai Viking. $27. Set in the Chicago of the mid-80s and Paris at the time of the 2015 terrorist attacks, Makkai's deeply affecting novel uses the AIDS epidemic and a mother's search for her estranged daughter to explore the effects of senseless loss and our efforts to overcome it. Her portrait of a group of friends, most of them gay men, conveys the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic's early years and follows its repercussions over decades. Empathetic without being sentimental, her novel amply earned its place among the contenders for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. THE PERFECT NANNY By Leila Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor Penguin Books. Paper, $16. We know from the outset of this unnerving cautionary tale (winner of the Goncourt Prize) that a beloved nanny has murdered the two children in her care; but what's even more remarkable about this unconventional domestic thriller is the author's intimate analysis of the special relationship between a mother and the person she hires to care for her offspring. Slimani writes devastating character studies, and she also raises painful themes: the forbidden desires parents project onto their nannies, racial and class tensions. In this mesmerizingly twisted novel, only one thing is clear: Loneliness can drive you crazy. THERE THERE By Tommy Orange Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. Orange's debut is an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life. Its many short chapters are told through a loosely connected group of Native Americans living in Oakland, Calif., as they travel to a powwow. They are all, as in Chaucer, pilgrims on their way to a shrine, or, as in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," an extended family crossing the landscape. The novel is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now. WASHINGTON BLACK By Esi Edugyan Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. This transcendent work of empathy and imagination, the 2018 winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize, opens on a sugar plantation in British Barbados in the waning days of slavery and, against that backdrop of unconscionable brutality, quickly tips us into a new world of possibility: one in which men take to the skies in hot-air balloons, dive to mysterious ocean depths and cross the Arctic on foot. Most daringly, it is a world in which a white slave master's brother and a young black slave can forge an indelible bond. With subtlety and eloquence, Edugyan unfolds a wondrous tale of exploration and discovery. Nonfiction AMERICAN PRISON A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment By Shane Bauer Penguin Press. $28. Bauer moved to rural Louisiana in 2014 to work undercover as a guard at the Winn Correctional Center, a privately run prison. He lasted four months before his deception was discovered, but that turned out to be more than sufficient to write a searing exposé for Mother Jones, which earned him a National Magazine Award and an invitation to speak to officials in Washington about problems in for-profit prisons. With this book, Bauer has expanded his article into a comprehensive analysis impossible to ignore. His book is a meticulous catalog of horrors, from the historical precursors - the practice of convict-leasing at Southern prisons after the Civil War, in which inmates were rented out to companies as a captive work force - to the rampant violence, neglect and incompetence that pervade a multibillion-dollar industry. EDUCATED A Memoir By Tara Westover Random House. $28. Westover's extraordinary memoir is an act of courage and self-invention. The youngest of seven children, she grew up in Idaho, in a survivalist family who lived so far offthe grid that she lacked even a birth certificate and did not attend school until she went to college. Getting in wasn't obvious: At home, reading meant studying the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and much of her childhood was spent helping her mother, an unlicensed midwife, and her father, a paranoid man who maintained a scrapmetal junkyard. In recounting her upbringing and her triumph over it - she would earn a Ph.D. in history at Cambridge - Westover took great risks and alienated family members. The reward is a book that testifies to an irrepressible thirst to learn. FREDERICK DOUGLASS Prophet of Freedom By David W. Blight Simon & Schuster. $37.50. A monumental work about a monumental figure. The charismatic Douglass was Abraham Lincoln's conscience, so to speak, and Blight's detailed, cinematic biography is the result of a lifetime of engagement with his subject. Douglass wrote three autobiographies himself, describing his rise from slavery to a role as one of the greatest figures of the 19th century, but Blight's work is fuller than any of those, relating both the public and private life in a way that Douglass either could not or would not undertake. The result is a portrait that is likely to stand as the definitive account for years to come. HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence By Michael Pollan Penguin Press. $28. Best known for his work on the ethics of eating, Pollan delivers his most personal book yet, one that demanded he drop acid in full view of the reader. Exploring the history and science of psychedelics, he tells of the rise and fall and rise again of our societal interest in these drugs, which are now thought to have many benefits, from helping with addiction to easing the terror of the terminally ill. The book hits its high point when he examines the mysticism and spirituality of the psychedelic experience. What can we learn about ourselves when the part of our mind controlling the ego drops away? What is this older, more primitive part of the brain, which connects us to how a child sees the world? It's a trip that leads him to wonder about how, ultimately, we can get the most out of our existences as conscious beings in the world. SMALL FRY By Lisa Brennan-Jobs Grove Press. $26. Brennan-Jobs grew up shuttling between two starkly different worlds: the bohemian, peripatetic world of her mother, an unstable and impoverished artist, and the luxurious world of her cruel and increasingly wealthy father, Steve Jobs. She provides indelible portraits of both parents, recreating the fraught landscape of her childhood in Palo Alto through the careful accretion of exquisitely granular detail. Her memoir is a work of uncanny intimacy, the debut of a singular literary sensibility. Ultimately, though, it is her portrayal of Jobs as a man prone to mind-boggling acts of emotional negligence and abuse that gives this book its overlay of devastation.
Library Journal Review
Be warned: this three-parter, four-narrator delight requires utmost attention. But be assured: rewards aplenty await. With crisp, almost staccato delivery, Candace Thaxton affectingly presents Part 1, "Folly," in which editor Alice and author Ezra share 97 years between them. Hint: Alice is 27, but the age difference doesn't prevent falling in love. Part 1 abruptly gives way to Part 2, "Madness," in which an Iraqi American economist is detained in London's Heathrow Airport en route to visiting his brother in Kurdistan. Narrator Aden -Hakimi modulates effortlessly between explication and emotion; however, production quality proves uneven as numerous phrases sound as if they were rerecorded in a tunnel, then clumsily re-inserted. The final, shortest section mimics a real-life BBC radio show, "Desert Island Discs," in which Fiona Hardingham adeptly interviews Arthur Morey as Ezra some years after "Folly." Part 3 is of utmost narrative importance as the illuminating connections are revealed; alas, it's aurally the most disappointing, with a haltingly spliced question-and-answer format as well as the dissonance between indulgent, almost grandfatherly Ezra in Part 1 and newly robust, self-satisfied Ezra in Part 3. -VERDICT Despite directorial miscues, Halliday's debut is so strong as to outshine any production stumbles. Libraries should prepare for substantial demand. ["Full of choices and of opposites-young/old, seasoned/novice, American/Iraqi-this thought-provoking book is evocative of the world we live in today. Highly recommended for readers of literary fiction": LJ 2/1/8 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
