From talented newcomer Patricia Traxler comes a brilliant literary suspense novel about how desire can become jealousy, obsession, and finally murderous rage. Blood is equal parts auspicious literary debut, pageturner, and erotic novel about four people whose lives become irrevocably intertwined during one year at Radcliffe College.
The narrator, Norrie Blume, is a painter who has accepted a prestigious fellowship at the college; she's excited to leave her job as a commercial graphic designer and take up the artist's life. But she's also in the middle of an intense love affair with a married colleague, an affair that is threatening to consume both their lives. At Radcliffe, Norrie develops friendships with two other fellows, a journalist and a poet. One is deep, comforting; the other ruled by need and guilt. These three intense relationships quickly begin to infringe upon each other, and soon the four of them seem to be hurtling toward some shocking-and perhaps tragic-end.
Blood is a triumph of suspense writing, a true psychological thriller about the nature of desire and the danger of love.
Blood red is the color of choice in this stylish, modishly erotic but only occasionally thrilling first novel by an award-winning poet. It's the favorite hue of painter Honora ("Norrie") Blume, who at 36 wins a Larkin Fellowship at Radcliffe in Cambridge, Mass., and it dominates her sex life as well: from the steamy dreams she has about her married novelist lover, Michael, to the horrifying miscarriage of his child. Unfortunately, red is also the color of a gigantic herring, which Traxler drags onstage early in the book in the persona of a disturbed Chilean journalist named Clara Brava. This demanding, jealous young woman quickly becomes the friend/neighbor from hell especially when Norrie is much more successful than her at making friends with Clara's idol, an Indian poet named Devi Bhujander. So when Devi is stabbed to death outside of the college-owned apartment building where all three women live, Clara is immediately suspected to be the killer. Having softened us up by creating Clara as the perfect monster, it would have been much more dramatically satisfying if Traxler had showed other possible murderers. She does but it's a ponderous (and finally hard to swallow) effort, with too much time spent discussing whether lover Michael will actually leave his tedious wife. There are some lovely poetic images ("I felt a bloat of grief") and some interesting secondary characters (especially an old woman dying in a nursing home, with whom Norrie has a strong bond based on a failed love affair with her dead son), but in the end the book conveys the thick and clotted feeling of too much emotion and not enough thought.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The title of this first novel by poet Traxler (Forbidden Words) refers not only to a murder but also to passion and to the paint used by artist Honora Blume, the novel's central character. Honora's intense secret involvement with a married man, a newly successful writer, suffuses her year as a fellow at Radcliffe's Larkin Institute. Traxler believably renders her character's creativity, both when Honora is unable to paint and when she ably expresses her ideas on her canvases, which are dominated by female nudes and varied reds. During her Larkin year, Honora balances painting, involvement with other "Larkies," a highly erotic relationship with her lover, and the murder of a friend. The homicide is solved mostly offstage, though the fear it generates is ever present. Traxler's language and her especially vivid descriptions benefit from her poetic abilities, while her plot and character development are also strong; a sense of loss and the quest for self-knowledge are as present here as in her poetry. Recommended for extensive mystery and contemporary fiction collections. Ruth H. Miller, Univ. of Southern Indiana Lib., Evansville, IN Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Award-winning poet and fiction writer Patricia Traxler is the author of three collections of poetry, Forbidden Words (University of Missouri), The Glass Woman (Hanging Loose Press), Blood Calendar (William Morrow), and a novel, Blood (St. Martins Press), which was also published in the U.K., and in Spanish, Swedish, and German translations.
A two-time Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe, Traxler also served as Hugo Poet at the University of Montana and Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State. She has lectured, read, or been a visiting writer at many other US universities, including the University of California, San Diego; Emerson College, Boston; Old Dominion University, Virginia; Westminster College, Salt Lake City; San Diego State University; Utah State University; and Kansas University, Lawrence.
Traxler was born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class Irish-Catholic family. She was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a published poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler's childhood. "Around our house on a daily basis," Traxler says, "I saw Gran working on her poetry in a green clothbound ledger, and I often heard her reciting poems like 'Thanatopsis' or 'To a Skylark,' just for the delight she took in them, so poetry always seemed an ordinary and essential part of life to me."
In addition to her own writing, Traxler has published two personal history anthologies: Vintage (Smoky Hill River Press), which contains first-person recollections ranging back in time to the first World War, and In Our Time (Smoky Hill River Press), which collects the memories of people who grew up on the Great Plains during the years from 1910-1975.
"Some of my most rewarding teaching experiences have come outside the world of academe, working with the elderly and with special needs groups," Traxler says. She has developed writing programs and projects for the deaf and hearing-impaired, for cancer patients, for homeless women and victims of domestic violence, and for mental health and stroke patients. "All of these experiences have been of great value to me," she says, "in particular for what they've taught me about the endless possibilities and complexities of human connection."
Traxler is a past recipient of Ploughshares' Cohen Award, Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Award, The Writer's Voice of New York City Open Voice Award for Short Fiction, the Hackney Literary Award for Short Fiction, Radcliffe's Presidential Discretionary Award, a Kansas Literary Fellowship, two Poetry Society of America Writer's Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award honors, the Alice Carter Award for Poetry, and the Georgia State University Award for Short Fiction. She is also a past Grand Prize winner of the International Imitation Hemingway Competition.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many publications, including The Nation, Slate, Agni, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms. Magazine, Hanging Loose, Tikkun, Glimmer Train, The American Voice, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and New Letters, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Best American Poetry (A.R. Ammons, editor), A Handbook of Heartbreak (Robert Pinsky, editor), A Ring of Words (Andrew Motion, editor), Tangled Vines (Beacon Press), e: the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology (Universities West), and The Best of Bad Hemingway: Award Anthology (Harcourt).
Traxler's essays have appeared in Newsweek and the anthologies Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Grandmothers: Granddaughters Remember (Syracuse University Press). Traxler lives in Kansas and has just finished her second novel, The Hunger Season, and is completing work on her fourth poetry collection, The Fires, and her first collection of short stories, I'll Always Love You (unless you love me, too), which looks with a darkly humorous eye at romantic love, fidelity and infidelity, the politics of sex, single life and marriage, and the question of when, if ever, it all begins to make sense.
website: www.patriciatraxler.com
Literary Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036
From the very first page there is a foreshadowing of blood and tragedy, but thirty-five years old Norrie is the happiest shes been in her life. She is thrilled to have been awarded the Larkin Fellowship at Radcliff where they pay her for one year to paint in a studio of her own and relocate her to an apartment in Harvard Housing where she intends to do the brunt of her painting.
Her lover, Michael, an accomplished writer, is married but he seems ready to leave his wife and children for her. Having her own apartment, (her last one she shared with a roommate) allows Norrie and Michael to spend a lot of quality time together there. The only fly in the ointment is Clara, Norries next door neighbor, whose possessiveness turns Norrie against her. When one of the Larkies who happens to be Norries best friend is murdered, everyone on campus thinks Clara did it even though there is no evidence linking her to the crime.
BLOOD is an erotic, dark and foreboding work that is more about different relationships than a typical murder mystery. The first person narrative makes the action up close and personal while allowing the audience an insightful view into Norries thought processes. The action, though theres not a lot of it, is pivotal to the story line. Patricia Traxler is a very talented writer who exposes the dark side of the human psyche to the audience.
Harriet Klausner
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I've always said that with good food, the best part was the taste in your mouth between bites & the same was true with this. That is as least until I got to the final quarter, which was finished today in one go. Entertaining & thought provoking throughout. I may not have always agreed with Norrie's beliefs on how life should be lived but I relished taking my time to reflect on what she had to say. Beautifully descriptive & poetic from the first sentence. *****
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I bought this book on a whim, something I rarely do. I picked it up and flipped through the pages, and something about the dialogue and tone of the author's voice caught me, so I figured what the heck?
I am so glad I did - this book was one I found I could hardly put down. There were several times when the cleverness of the dialogue made me laugh out loud, and other times the descriptions of emotions made me want to weep. Being an artist myself (music and photography), I could thoroughly appreciate Norrie's struggle to be creative, how panicked she felt at the thought of that creativity deserting her and how obsessed she was once it got hold of her again.
There may have been some loose ends here and there, but I'm not a book critic - I just know this particular story spoke to my heart in a way that hasn't been done in a long time, and I hope Ms. Traxler graces us with more books before too long.
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First Sentence:
I'd spent most of the week packing my worldly belongings for the move to Brattle Street, and by Friday night I was nearly finished. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
green glass ring, red glass pitcher, colloquium room, colloquium presentation, missing painting, red pitcher, painting clothes, phone machine
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Detective Burns, Brattle Street, Devi Bhujander, Jane Coleman, Harvard Square, Michael Sullivan, Paul Monnard, Harvard Housing, New York, Santa Monica, South Boston, Third Eye, United States, Larkin Institute, Mass Ave, The Frame-Up, Los Angeles, Radcliffe Yard, Brookline Manor, Christmas Eve, Eighty-two Brattle, Georgi Brandt, Poor Clara, Serena Holwerda, Back Bay
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