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Summary
Summary
From acclaimed Orange Prize and Guardian First Book Award finalist Samantha Harvey, a stunning novel of female friendship, betrayal, and revenge
"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief.
The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions.
"Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio."
Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes.
"While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach."
Dear Thief is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in a striking and indelible way.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With her eerie and arresting latest, Harvey ( The Wilderness ) gives the neologism frenemy a full-book treatment. Unexpectedly sensing the presence of a long-absent friend whose whereabouts are unknown, the unnamed female narrator composes a series of unsent letters to her after years of incuriosity you might call callous. That callousness stems in part from a legitimate grievance: the last time the narrator welcomed her beautiful and capricious friend, Nina, into her Shropshire home, Nina ended up departing with her host's husband in tow. Almost two decades later, the narrator is working in London at an elderly care home and considering whether to reconcile with her estranged husband when she begins her one-sided correspondence with Nina. Full of deflections and obfuscations, the letters recount the adversarial relationship between the more earthbound narrator and the exotic Nina, a British-Lithuanian world-traveler nicknamed Butterfly, that fragile and most temporary of creatures. Adopting various tones--lyrical, speculative, ironic, nostalgic, conciliatory, murderously bitter--the narrator reflects on the intensity of the women's bond and reveals large and small betrayals on both sides. This controlled, thrilling novel derives its power from the perversity of a friendship in which the pair is always closer when one has taken too much from the other. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Samantha Harvey continues to confound expectations. Her first novel, 2009's The Wilderness, explored the mind of a retired widower grappling with Alzheimer's disease. The understated and fractured narrative made the book a difficult read at times, and yet, by the end of it, one felt one had experienced a life. It went on to be longlisted for the Man Booker, shortlisted for the Orange prize and the Guardian first book award, and to win a Betty Trask prize. Harvey's second novel, All Is Song, was, if anything, even more understated. She stuck with the third-person narrator, with characters many years her senior, and with male protagonists, two brothers. She painted miniature portraits in painstaking detail, but the tiny canvases - or maybe it was the reduced palette - limited the novel to a degree. Dear Thief, Harvey's atmospheric third novel, denotes a major shift in gear. Harvey (pictured) has switched gender and pronoun. Here she uses a first-person female narrator, addressing herself to the eponymous thief, who is narrated in the second person: "You pitched your ragged beauty on our windowsill like a makeshift tent; really you never did look like somebody who was going to be there long." The novel is presented as a long letter, a literary device that is difficult to pull off, but Harvey's innovations electrify every word. The plot details a love triangle. A middle-aged woman (for Harvey has remained loyal to her ageing characters, and to the topic of ageing in general) sits down the night after Christmas to write to her absent friend-turned-foe, the woman who stole her husband and their future together. She addresses this treasured and abhorred old friend by her pet name, Butterfly. Butterfly, we gradually find out, has not been seen in years. Butterly is fragile, but also lethal. She is exotic and fearless and selfish and dangerous, a wholly fascinating invention - invention being the operative word, because the Butterfly we are introduced to is, essentially, the invention of the letter-writer, who must narrate her in her absence. She no longer knows where Butterfly is, whether she is even alive, and so she writes to - and about - "this tentative, hypothesised you". All this is set against the backdrop of the final days of Soviet control of Lithuania, where Butterfly's family is from. In the voice of a middle-aged woman looking back over her marriage, Harvey has struck gold. It is an educated and meditative voice, reminiscent of those deployed by great stylists such as WG Sebald, Claire Messud, John Banville and Joseph O'Neill. Why is this voice so evocative, I found myself wondering. Why is it (literally, as it happens) striking a chord? The answer is Leonard Cohen. Dear Thief is a novelisation of Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", a song about a love triangle, which is also presented as a letter to the third party who broke up a marriage. Both letters are started at four in the morning at the end of December. Harvey's narrator sits at a desk in Goodge Street, London, not Clinton Street, New York. It's cold and she is no longer in the family home, but she likes her apartment - there's music all evening from the jazz bar down the road. Butterfly wears a shawl, which over the years becomes filthy and torn at the shoulder, like the blue raincoat of Cohen's song. Both letter-writers wonder whether their old friend is better yet, for both the marriage-wreckers have demons. Both are now living in a house in the desert. And, of course, there is the lock of hair. This is not to say that Dear Thief achieves its emotional power because of the song - I connected the two some time after I had finished the book. The novel had left an imprint in its own right. Dear Thief is written in the same key as the song - a minor and melancholic one, which captures a heady, elegiac combination of eroticism and loss, loathing and rapture, the messy complexity of a spurned woman's emotional landscape. Harvey's narrator watches her beloved friend seduce her husband - "somebody we love has loved someone else more, and we feel swiped aside like a skittle" - and although she is unable to forgive her friend for stealing her future, she is unable to stop caring about her either. In most books, events happen solely on the page. In the best books, events happen in the reader, too. Perhaps because it is so intimate, so honest, so raw, Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life, the people in it as well as the ghosts. Claire Kilroy's The Devil I Know is published by Faber. 272pp, Jonathan Cape, pounds 16.99 - Claire Kilroy Dear Thief is a novelisation of [Leonard Cohen]'s "Famous Blue Raincoat", a song about a love triangle, which is also presented as a letter to the third party who broke up a marriage. Both letters are started at four in the morning at the end of December. [Samantha Harvey]'s narrator sits at a desk in Goodge Street, London, not Clinton Street, New York. It's cold and she is no longer in the family home, but she likes her apartment - there's music all evening from the jazz bar down the road. Butterfly wears a shawl, which over the years becomes filthy and torn at the shoulder, like the blue raincoat of Cohen's song. Both letter-writers wonder whether their old friend is better yet, for both the marriage-wreckers have demons. Both are now living in a house in the desert. And, of course, there is the lock of hair. - Claire Kilroy.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Dear Thief is a dark and brooding letter, composed over the span of many months, that meanders through a formative friendship in a collection of remembrances, accusations, apologies, and explanations. Though the correspondent remains unnamed, she addresses her assertions and confessions to Nina, aka Butterfly (the titular thief), a woman whom the writer cannot decide whether to love or hate. Nina is a consummate wanderer and seeker, flitting in and out of the writer's sphere. She experiments with different religions, homes, and drugs before reinserting herself in the writer's adult life, where she leaves a lasting mark not only on the writer herself but also on her marriage and family before disappearing again. Nearly two decades later, the writer begins her missive, if not to resurrect Nina, then to at least recall their years together and perhaps to find some peace or meaning in them so that she can move forward. Harvey (The Wilderness, 2009) is an exceptionally talented author. The letter, written in beautiful prose, is mesmerizing and deftly captures the shades of jealousy, longing, and hope that color any painfully triangular relationship. Readers will be moved by this deeply emotional and introspective journey toward acceptance and, possibly, forgiveness.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2014 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Central character Nina is missing from Harvey's third novel (following Wilderness and All Is Song), which takes the form of a long, rambling letter written to her by her estranged childhood friend. Gone for the past 18 years, Nina (or Butterfly) may now be living in Lithuania, from which her Jewish parents escaped when the Nazis arrived and to which they briefly returned before the communists took over. As Nina's backstory begins to emerge, each revelation comes as a tiny shock wave. Each illumination also sheds light on the twisty paths of the narrator's own history: her marriage and separation from her husband, the birth of her son, her work in a home for seniors and posing as a live model for art students, and her relationship with a Greek restaurant owner. VERDICT A story about a long friendship and the betrayals that tore it apart, this thoughtful meditation, interspersed with reflections on philosophy, religion, and poetry, is about the passage of time, the accumulation of memory, and the hard-won wisdom of aging. For readers of literary fiction.-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
