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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
bye-bye, January 19, 2000
This review is from: Bye-Bye (Paperback)
excellent... nothing like it. If you like updike, vonnegut and martin amis this book will make you jump. Best book I've read in years. This is an excellent effort at the highest level of serious fiction. The story is great, the pace and language wonderful. A definite plus to any collection.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Bye-Bye" : a game of esoteric exploration and return, October 19, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Bye-Bye (Paperback)
"Bye- Bye" has everything : live characters and dialogues, action, suspense, sex, general statements influenced by different philosophical and psychological theories and some times lyricism . The protagonist, changes her identity and she gets involved in three love affairs at the same time. And as she tries to escape her past ( her childhood, her mother - her father, her schizophrenic brother and her husband even her current affairs which become past so quickly ) , testing her limits moving forward, I can listen to the poetic motive, which accompanies this "voyage", this adventure : "Bye - Bye". "Bye - Bye" is both a farewell to a life and an itching for an esoteric exploration, acceptance and catharsis. In the very beginning, I liked that a woman writer dares to write about sexual fantasies fictionalizing them especially in a country where "people are scandalized by the same thing that they feel excited". But after that, I understood the most important : that the sex scenes are not only "fresh" but also true , tender, lively and essentially linked with the structure and the development of the characters , almost innocent, unapologetic and that's why poetically attractive. Also, I would like to mention some fragments of the book that I liked very much because of its profundity, of its poetic precision , and because of its lyrical quality. See, for example, in one of them, how beautifully fictionalized are the scenes from the childhood of the protagonist : "But it was only after my mother ran off with the chairman of my fathers drama department that a force field up sprang up creating The House. It was precisely then that gravity increased ; the floor became hypermagnetized .From then on, objects fell and stuck to it -towels. books, dishes, newspapers, bottles cans, unopened mail, spoiled food...Most of our furniture also snapped, toppled , or sagged floorward.. For some weeks now, every day at 3.30 P.M. I lie face down on the kitchen floor, overwhelmed by the memory of my body growing heavier the moment I entered The House each day after my room , lock the door, and bulldoze through the piles of clothes, magazines, and hair curls to the bed, where I would lie still as a giant slug until evening." See also the description of the schizophrenic brother : " But back then, the only tidy place in The House was my brother's room. Within the first month after my mothers flight, he covered his walls with dozens of maps, all nearly Scotch taped or push-pinned in place, and dozens of clocks, all set to same correct time. On all the maps, my brother marked the location of "The House". Like me, he has always been ambitious : the maps varied in range from our township, to the United States, to the entire solar system. Sometimes my brother drew in The House as rectangle, with an isosceles triangle on top. Other times it was a red paper dot stuck on the planet Earth. On his desk , a chess game was perpetually in progress; my brother played both sides. He kept his room bathed in white light twenty four hours per day using ten or so lamps with bare light bulbs." And listen to the rhythm in this wonderful fragment about the Lover : " My lover is a puzzle. My lover is an anesthetic. My lover is a religion - a vague, impersonal power , pleasant to surrender to " And, see, the rare lyrical quality in this sentence from the narration of her mother's death. " The TV glowed like an arctic sun, twenty- four hours" "The point of no return" : how strange, how poetically necessary, and poetically charged, how profoundly equivocal and evocative and at the same time perfectly linked with the purity of the memories of her childhood. " All haunted houses remind me of my mother, as do all points of no return. Mom took me to one on my eighth birthday. A conveyer belt carried us through the dark. We stood upright, moving forward without walking whirrrrrr, as in a dream. Each of us gripped one handrail ( the rails moved in tandem with the belt, as on as escalator ), and held the others hand in the middle. We passed two witches, some skeletons, one werewolf, one vampire, one Frankenstain Whoosh!! Cold win blew against us, the darkness grew absolute, and the conveyer belt dipped downward as if we were falling ; a voice said, " You have reached the point of no return . Bye-byeeeee" I screamed and lunged at my mother. We were propelled past two heavy vinyl flaps , into full daylight . The ride was over. Whenever we set out to seduce someone or to be seduced, it is always the point of no return to which we aspire After that point there is not going backward , it is going forward ,no matter what , there is no more doubt. ". Jane Ransom, gifted with poetic profundity, sensibility, and discernment proves to be a real writer who deserves the best compliment : She made us to eagerly want to wait for her next novel.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Bye-Bye" : a game of esoteric exploration and return, October 19, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Bye-Bye (Paperback)
"Bye- Bye" has everything : live characters anddialogues, action, suspense, sex, general statements influenced bydifferent philosophical and psychological theories and some times lyricism . The protagonist, changes her identity and she gets involved in three love affairs at the same time. And as she tries to escape her past ( her childhood, her mother - her father, her schizophrenic brother and her husband even her current affairs which become past so quickly ) , testing her limits moving forward, I can listen to the poetic motive, which accompanies this "voyage", this adventure : "Bye - Bye". "Bye - Bye" is both a farewell to a life and an itching for an esoteric exploration, acceptance and catharsis. In the very beginning, I liked that a woman writer dares to write about sexual fantasies fictionalizing them especially in a country where "people are scandalized by the same thing that they feel excited". But after that, I understood the most important : that the sex scenes are not only "fresh" but also true , tender, lively and essentially linked with the structure and the development of the characters , almost innocent, unapologetic and that's why poetically attractive. Also, I would like to mention some fragments of the book that I liked very much because of its profundity, of its poetic precision , and because of its lyrical quality. See, for example, in one of them, how beautifully fictionalized are the scenes from the childhood of the protagonist : "But it was only after my mother ran off with the chairman of my fathers drama department that a force field up sprang up creating The House. It was precisely then that gravity increased ; the floor became hypermagnetized .From then on, objects fell and stuck to it -towels. books, dishes, newspapers, bottles cans, unopened mail, spoiled food...Most of our furniture also snapped, toppled , or sagged floorward.. For some weeks now, every day at 3.30 P.M. I lie face down on the kitchen floor, overwhelmed by the memory of my body growing heavier the moment I entered The House each day after my room , lock the door, and bulldoze through the piles of clothes, magazines, and hair curls to the bed, where I would lie still as a giant slug until evening." See also the description of the schizophrenic brother : " But back then, the only tidy place in The House was my brother's room. Within the first month after my mothers flight, he covered his walls with dozens of maps, all nearly Scotch taped or push-pinned in place, and dozens of clocks, all set to same correct time. On all the maps, my brother marked the location of "The House". Like me, he has always been ambitious : the maps varied in range from our township, to the United States, to the entire solar system. Sometimes my brother drew in The House as rectangle, with an isosceles triangle on top. Other times it was a red paper dot stuck on the planet Earth. On his desk , a chess game was perpetually in progress; my brother played both sides. He kept his room bathed in white light twenty four hours per day using ten or so lamps with bare light bulbs." And listen to the rhythm in this wonderful fragment about the Lover : " My lover is a puzzle. My lover is an anesthetic. My lover is a religion - a vague, impersonal power , pleasant to surrender to " And, see, the rare lyrical quality in this sentence from the narration of her mother's death. " The TV glowed like an arctic sun, twenty- four hours" "The point of no return" : how strange, how poetically necessary, and poetically charged, how profoundly equivocal and evocative and at the same time perfectly linked with the purity of the memories of her childhood. " All haunted houses remind me of my mother, as do all points of no return. Mom took me to one on my eighth birthday. A conveyer belt carried us through the dark. We stood upright, moving forward without walking whirrrrrr, as in a dream. Each of us gripped one handrail ( the rails moved in tandem with the belt, as on as escalator ), and held the others hand in the middle. We passed two witches, some skeletons, one werewolf, one vampire, one Frankenstain Whoosh!! Cold win blew against us, the darkness grew absolute, and the conveyer belt dipped downward as if we were falling ; a voice said, " You have reached the point of no return . Bye-byeeeee" I screamed and lunged at my mother. We were propelled past two heavy vinyl flaps , into full daylight . The ride was over. Whenever we set out to seduce someone or to be seduced, it is always the point of no return to which we aspire After that point there is not going backward , it is going forward ,no matter what , there is no more doubt. ". Jane Ransom, gifted with poetic profundity, sensibility, and discernment proves to be a real writer who deserves the best compliment : She made us to eagerly want to wait for her next novel.
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