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Disapparation of James, The |  |
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Disapparation of James, The | |
The Woodrow family is going to the circus to celebrate Greta's seventh birthday. When five-year-old brother James eagerly volunteers to join the magic act, his parents watch with pride as he climbs onto the stage alongside the clown. The trick is spectacular and applause rings through the crowd as James disappears -- vanishing before their very eyes. The trouble is, James really did disappear . . . into thin air.
In the aftermath of James's disappearance, with the police investigation providing no clues, the laws of the universe come into question. His mother becomes lost in her dreams and his father becomes obsessed with the clown, while his big sister Greta sets out to figure out what happened.
A novel peppered with dreams, premonitions, and possible realities, The Disapparation of James is a work of enormous sensitivity, tenderness, and wit.
作者简介 Anne Ursu is the author of Spilling Clarence. She has worked at a major book retailer, as the theater critic for City Pages in Minneapolis and as an arts writer for the Portland Phoenix in Maine. She lives in Hopkins, Minnesota.
媒体推荐 "Ursu's story is sweetly done, her own compelling magic trick." -- Entertainment Weekly
"Ursu's storytelling is engaging and pleasantly disorienting." -- Bookstreet USA
...powerfully evokes the tenderness of the bond between parent and child, and the parent's never-ending awareness of its fragility -- Washington Post Book World, May 4, 2003
Seductive...Like Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto," (Ursu's book) celebrates the glory of ordinary life in the midst of trauma. -- Newsday, January 5, 2003
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
Alternative realities and parallel plot lines coexist in Ursu's surreal but psychologically acute second novel (after Spilling Clarence), in which a boy chosen from a circus audience to disappear during a clown's magic act really does disappear. Hannah and Justin Woodrow bring their daughter, Greta, to the circus for her seventh birthday, along with her five-year-old brother, James. Greta is outgoing, quick-witted and full of energy, while James is so quiet his mother plans to bring him to a specialist for tests. Both parents thrill when James is selected from the audience and responds charmingly to the clown's every request. Then, suddenly, James is gone. The police assign someone to watch over the family, but the officer turns from friend to aggressor while Mike the Clown is transformed from suspect to victim. Hannah dissociates, Justin obsesses and Greta does research. The child is the only one who is able to confront the loss directly. Ursu mixes realistic depictions of police interrogations and domestic tensions with fantastic interludes like a chapter imagining the day after James's disappearance as it would have been if the disappearance had not occurred. She delicately probes the worry and longing, guilt and rage, protectiveness and resentment that characterize parental love. James's "disapparation" is even more a mystery at the end of the novel than at the beginning, but it doesn't seem to matter, since Ursu wins the reader over with her humane wisdom and charming vision of the limitless possibilities of a child's imagination. One only wishes that Greta-the novel's pivotal character-were not quite so cloying.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
