Attachment (Vintage) [Paperback]

Isabel Fonseca (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage | Publication Date: June 16, 2009

After more than twenty years of life in London, Jean and Mark Hubbard decamp to a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But when Jean, a health columnist, discovers a salacious love letter addressed to her husband, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over - and a new quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious correspondence that propels her on to alarming and illuminating adventures of her own. Isabel Fonseca explores the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a compelling fiction debut, Fonseca takes syndicated health columnist Jean Hubbard, an Oxford-trained lawyer, through a dramatic demonstration of the limits of attachment. Jean is filing her columns from the remote Indian Ocean island of St. Jacques, where her advertising-genius husband, Mark, has moved them. Their time there is disrupted when Jean intercepts a salacious letter from Mark's London office, which leads her in turn to an e-mail signed by a lubricious Giovana (Jean immediately notices the odd single n). The e-mail features explicit attachments, and without reflecting on the consequences, Jean, writing as Mark, begins an e-mail correspondence with Giovana. Ensuing events occur in a beautifully orchestrated dramatic arc, drawing in Mark's unscrupulous business partner; Jean's stricken father in New York; Mark's first love's daughter; Jean's former beau; and the secret that pushes the 23-year marriage further toward the precipice. Fonseca's nonfiction Bury Me Standing drew a vivid portrait of the international Gypsy community, and she shifts locales and emotional registers with evocative ease here, delving deeply into her ensemble's motivations. She's as unsparing of their flaws as she is frank about their desires. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

A cultured British couple who pride themselves on unconventionality decamp to an island in the Indian Ocean, intending to continue their careers (his, advertising; hers, a women’s-health column) via the Internet. Then the wife opens a smutty letter to her husband, apparently from a lover. Rather than endure this affair, after twenty-three years of marriage, she goes online masquerading as her husband, and initiates an X-rated e-mail relationship with her rival. The plot strains credulity, but Fonseca’s vivisection of matrimony and desire is cruelly exacting. She likens pornography to a bullfight, at first "mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace," yet ultimately disappointing. "How in the world," she wonders, "could it be boring and arousing at the same time?"
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307386511
• ISBN-13: 978-0307386519
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,663,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Boring, April 30, 2008

By 

Compulsive Reader (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Attachment (Hardcover)

Attachment has been advertised as a "bold" fictional debut that "reaches from the Indian Ocean to London and New York" and "into the most confounding precincts of the human heart." While the other claims are arguable, it's certainly confounding. The biggest question is, why would anyone care about the protagonist when she demonstrates nothing but the most humorless pomposity and self-obsession? Her every other character is a cardboard cut-out, and the prose is so overwritten as to be indigestible. In the end, who could blame the fictional husband for having an affair?

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars disappointed, June 1, 2008

By 

Lisa the history professor "lisaprof" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Attachment (Hardcover)

I read Fonseca's non-fiction study of the gypsies, which had an engrossing subject but was not well organized. I had hoped that her interesting life had led her to write engaging fiction, and I was moved to buy the book after reading about it in the New York Times.

From the start, I was not at all convinced by the character's behaviors. I needed much more psychological background about what would drive a woman to pretend to be her husband and correspond with the "other woman." It is unclear why the woman chooses not to confront her husband.

The characters of this book did not feel fully evolved. The dialogue, especially that of the American characters, did not read as truly American in style. Much of what they said resembled English phrasing (where Fonseca now lives) rather than American. When the characters are in New York, one should feel that through the language.

Characters in the book exit and enter scenes clumsily. Sometimes someone has seemed to have left the scene, but suddenly, there they are again. I beleive the editors did Fonseca a disservice by not catching more of these little inconsistencies.

I was really ready to enjoy this book, but is feel flat with me. I really tried to make myself read it, but why, I am not sure.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Endless Puff, May 24, 2008

By 

Pluvius - See all my reviews

This review is from: Attachment (Hardcover)

Having read the endless puff about Fonseca in the New York Times and other publications, I was expecting a graceful and intelligent piece of work. Attachment is neither. How this talentless woman ever got this book published in the first place is beyond me. (Marriage to a famous author, anyone?)