Dept. of Speculation Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I5S1GC0 | Format: PDF
Dept. of Speculation Description
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though it's bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 3 hours and 10 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
- Audible.com Release Date: January 31, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I5S1GC0
Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (out today) is a really hard novel about which to write anything coherent. First of all, it's not really a novel — it's closer to a long short story. As well, it's closer to a piece of modern art in words than it is a novel. And like a painting you stare at with relaxed eyes until meaning reveals itself, as you read these short snippets of text, of quotes from philosophers and scientists, and of actual story, an affecting tale of a marriage in trouble rises to the surface. Then, before you know it (it's only 176 pages, and it's really much shorter than that), it's over and you're paging through it again to remind yourself what a truly unique book this is.
The story is about a woman living in New York City who marries a musician. The nameless woman is a published novelist, but has failed to produce a second book, and is ghost writing a memoir of a cheesy failed astronaut to help pay the bills. Her husband is a musician.
They have a daughter. They get bed bugs in their small NYC apartment. The woman's sister and friends husbands' have affairs.
"She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”
Her husband has an affair. The wife nearly loses her mind. She reads an adultery book, and they go to counseling, which she dubs The Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. They work at reconciliation. They reconcile.
And that's it. But that's SO not it.
One of the measures of a really talented writer, a writer I'll read no matter what s/he is writing about, is one that can describe something in a way no one has before. And that's what Offill does here.
“Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business,” writes Jenny Offill about halfway through her inventive and amazing new novel, DEPT. OF SPECULATION. Ostensibly the story of a marriage and motherhood, it is, despite its brevity and economy of words, a deeply philosophical exploration of self. The narrator (though there is a shift to third-person narrative at one point) is an unnamed teacher, writer, mother and wife looking back over the relationships and decisions of her adult life and contemplating the complexity, difficulty and joy of it all.
Her plan, confirmed by the Post-It note above her desk that read “work, not love!” was to live her life as an art monster, concerning herself only with art and not the stuff of ordinary life. But a romance that included travel and the sharing of personal stories became a marriage, and soon the two were joined by an intense baby girl with dark eyes and sweet-smelling hair. Dreams of a life spent creating turns into a life spent grading and the thrill of travel traded in for a city apartment with an infestation problem. The art monster becomes a woman whose time is consumed with diapers and preschool, bedtime stories and broken bones. Yet it is in those mundane moments that the story soars, questioning the day to day and capturing the tension between contentment and yearning for more. When the narrator's husband's infidelity comes to light, she must assess her marriage and decide what is of most value to her as she struggles to decide whether she can forgive or not.
Offill's sparse style is jarring at first, but readers soon settle into the lyrical rhythm of the novel, which is less traditional narrative and more connected observations, statements and declarations of emotion put into chronological order.
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