Charades [Mass Market Paperback]

Janette Turner Hospital (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1990

Written by the author of "The Ivory Swing", "The Tiger in the Tiger Pit", "Borderline" and a collection of short stories, "Dislocations", this is an account of a woman's search for her origins.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Neither artifice nor parlor game, the title refers to the various versions of herself considered by Charade Ryan, a young Australian searching for her father. Raised in the bush by her mother, an earthy, clear-eyed woman content with her 10 children and no husband, Charade is obsessed by a need to know her English father and leaves to find him as soon as she's old enough. His trail fades in England, but she continues on to Canada; then in America, she attends the classes at MIT of a famous physicist whose resemblance to her father was once noted by her aunt. Charade and the professor begin an affair that is erotic, episodic and very talky, befitting intercourse between a woman whose name echoes Scheherazade's and a man called only Koenig. Amid references to the flux of time, along with quotes ranging from The Book of 1001 Nights through Captain Cook's journals to Robert Oppenheimer, Charade tries to trace the truth of her beginnings. At the same time, Koenig attempts to disengage from his former wife, who was a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. How the two stories connect illustrates Turner's fine-tuned story-telling abilities ( Borderline ), but by this complex tale's end readers may be feeling as full of uncertainty as Heisenberg's principle of physics predicts.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

One of ten illegitimate children of Bea Ryan, Charade (that's Sha-rahd) leaves the remote Australian bush country to try to locate the long-gone father she's never met. In this many-layered drama of dreamlike/real/possible explanations of the past, Charade struggles futilely to unearth the truth of her history. Hospital's story and characters are vivid, but she is a complicated stylist, and the reader works hard to follow the twisting path of discovery: under what name is Charade's supposed father living? On what continent? Who was Verity Ashkenazy, the mysterious, troubled woman he is thought to have followed? Tantalizing, convoluted, with few substantial rewards, but shimmering with possibilities. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Bantam (January 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055328505X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553285055
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,764,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New physics meets tropical wonderland, April 22, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Bangkok) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charades (Hardcover)

If you want a trip to where the arcane world of new physics meets the tropical wonderland of northern Australia, Janette Hospital Turner will take you there. Her Australian character is in search of her father at a university in the United States and spins in and out of a professor's life like an electron knocked out of its orbit. The story also takes you into her past, and her family's past, to a dead man in the woods who she befriends, to rural Australia with all its toughness and lushness. A book to be savoured, not least for its kick-in-the-pants twist at the end.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Hospital Story, October 28, 2004

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Charades (Paperback)

There seems to be no end to the great stories that Mr. Hospital spins. In this, her fifth book, a young woman named Charade Ryan from the Australian rainforest travels to Canada, then to Boston in search of her English father Nicholas Truman. Her earthy mother, Bea Ryan, mother of ten children by as many men, at first offers little help in this young woman's quest as she advises her daughter to "let sleeping dogs lie." But as we have come to expect by now, in Ms. Hospital's stories things are seldom as they seem.

This writer's trademarks are all here: (1) the many references to other literary works and quotations from other writers: Captain Cook, Robert Oppenheimer, Primo Levi, Jorge Luis Borges, Claudine Vegh's I DIDN'T SAY GOODBYE: INTERVIEWS WITH CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST and finally THE BOOK OF THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND ONE NIGHT-- it becomes apparent that Charade is a modern day Scheherazade as she tells parts of her story night after night to the older MIT physics professor Koenig in an effort to make their affair last. (2) As always, Ms. Hospital writes about serious subjects: memory-- that the process of recollection is imperfect at best-- the Holocaust, a child's continuing effort to know her parents. (3) Of course, this author teases us with her prose-- "What quantumleaped me?"-- and (4) makes profound statements about relationships: ". . . a marriage has begun to end long before one partner moves out." "On the other hand. . . a marriage certainly does not end with the final decree of the divorce." And finally: "It is impossible to live with someone who is deeply and dangerously unhappy. And it is even harder to leave. . ."

This novel is at once cerebral but also deeply emotional. You won't be able to put it down.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally stunning, as are most of Ms. Hospital's novels, April 17, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Charades (Hardcover)

As is usually the case with Hospital, you start out slow and even a bit bored - but continue on and soon you find yourself saying "wow" at both the plot and the prose. "Spellbinding" is frequently used for alot of fiction in general, - for Hospital it fits. This is one you will sit down and read again as if taking a trip to a private magical place