Customer Reviews

The Cottagers: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I really enjoyed this book; I bought it a day before heading out for a 4 day vacation on the southwest coast of rugged Vancouver Island, exactly where this novel spins its web and sucks the unsuspecting reader in. Maybe it was because I could easily connect with the locale or maybe it was because of the author's use of words but this one was a hit for me. I made it a point to drive through East Sooke and hike through the park to water's edge to "feel" the tensions that must have overcome the characters; Cyrus, Nicholas, Greg, Laurel and Samina on the "fateful day" and in the days following. The beautiful descriptions of beach stones and the topography of Sooke Bay made this read very personal. I wonder how much time the author spent in the area; he certainly captures the beauty, mystery and lore of being "out there". Gorgeous. I would have given this a 5 star had it not been for the last section which was a bit unbelieveable and out of place with the rest of the book. My advice? Go to Sooke, Vancouver Island, BC for a visit.

Young Marshall Klimasewiski has a bright future ahead of him if his novel THE COTTAGERS is any indication. Summer people are always an interesting subject for a novel, for there is something wry about their privilege and they becomes objects of fascination or contempt for the year-round residents, just ask Nick Carraway from THE GREAT GATBSY. There's something of Nick Carraway in the teenage protagonist of THE COTTAGERS, but here his name is Cyrus Coddington, and the passions the summer visitors unleash have a distinctly Canadian feel to them; Klimasewiski can describe the warm, clammy heatscapes of Vancouver Island as did Malcolm Lorwy and Dorothy Livesay before him. His tragic foreboding is his own.

Sometimes Cyrus seems a bit too observant and poetic, but that's the nature of the game. The US citizens who take up residence, the easy life, this particular summer are trying to escape the hell of academia, and one of the couples, Nicholas and his Indian-born wife, Samina, seem bewilderingly adrift on the seas of inter-racial tensions, despite having the bond of a lovely daughter, little Hilda, to seal their union. (Hilda celebrates her fourth birthday, and her parents invite Cyrus to the party.) The other couple, Greg and Laurel, are even more neurotic. Cyrus has a sort of COLD COMFORT FARM fixation on them all, and his strange kinship with these strangers begins to seem more and more weird, especially when one disappears and the other survivors begin wondering, what path took us here to this terrifyingly native place?

All of these interpersonal relationships are colored by another character's interest in the personal life of Charles Dodgson, better known to the world as Lewis Carroll, and his possibly demented interest in little girls. Like Henry James, Marshall Klimasewiski knows how to frame a story so that its children, like little Hilda, playing with her crabs, seem terrifyingly in danger even in placid, intellectual surroundings. In some ways I thought, that THE COTTAGERS resembles a modern version of Dickens' unfinished MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, right down to its hint of an exotic India lurking in the background of the visitors, but finished this time, to a perfect patina of loss, regret, desire and dementia. As Cyrus says, "Evil is never broke."

Reading a few brief reviews of this book, I expected something really good....but it turned out to be one of only a very few books that I just could not finish....I got halfway through the jumble of plot, setting and character, with the latter so lacking that I could not feel anything for any of the characters. I was mostly just confused and often challenged to find not just the relationship between subject and predicate but to find subject and predicate themselves inside clauses with numerous and confusing pronouns for characters that were missing in inaction. I had to reread numerous sentences to make the most basic sense of them, and even then I often felt I was guessing.

I was reminded of an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. He was talking about the most challenging aspect of fiction as striking the right balance between character and plot with the right emphasis on each of them in a story told in a way that was accessibleto the reader. This book is an example of missing that balance in the vehicle of a story that gets close to being interesting but never quite makes it. Coupled with weak characterization and awkward sentence structure, this one was a miss for me.

I have to agree with other reviewers who criticize this novel's plot. I found both the story and the characters to be irritating at worst and depressing at best. However, the richness of the writing kept me sufficiently interested to see the tale through to the end. The novel's contemporary literary quality combined with the personality of the landscape (a main character unto itself) as it is described make for at least an interesting read.

Nineteen years old unemployed Cyrus Collingwood lives year round in East Sooke on Vancouver Island. He detests the summer rentals though the hot weather invaders are the prime source of income for the locals. Cyrus enjoys being a peeping tom spying on the temporary newcomers and in brazen moments loves to assault their rentals though besides scaring ten years off their lives, he normally does not harm them.

This summer he obsesses over two families; married Brooklyn couple Samina and Nicholas and their three-year-old daughter Hilda; and their St. Louis friends Laurel and Greg. He pretends to be their friend by showing them the hidden highlights of the island. However, the brilliant teen reads his guests quite nicely as he realizes there is an undercurrent professional rivalry and resentment between the historian Nicholas, the biographer Greg, and the English professor Laurel as well as realizing Greg is a womanizer. The exotic looking Samina is the one that attracts Cyrus as she does not fit with the others and he fails to psychology profile her. When Nicholas fails to return from a walk, accusations fly everywhere encouraged by sly Cyrus who knows what happened on the solitary beach.

The concept that the masks people wear in relationships change when the dynamics between individuals alter which can be caused by an outside party is proven in this tale. The story line is fascinating though the action is limited and the key characters never seem fully developed. Relationship drama fans will appreciate the hypothesis driven plot that unmasks visage armor, but fails to go deep into the psyche of the island visitors or even Cyrus.

Harriet Klausner

Canada's Vancouver Island may sound like the ideal spot to escape summer heat and relax but as the characters in Klimasewiski's debut novel soon discover it really isn't a very good place for a vacation. No barbecues or idle days of boating for these people who seek to resurrect a friendship, only to find tragedy and suspicion.

Nicholas, Samina and Hilda are a small, tight family. She is of Indian extraction and a beauty. He is tall, balding, in need of eye glasses, just what one expects an academician to look like. They will be sharing a cottage with Greg and Laurel, a pair who no longer love one another "in any enlarging or passionate sense." Former roommates, Laurel and Samina now regard each other with jealousy, while the men do not have a particularly high regard for each other's professional accomplishments.

That would be quite enough to make for a tense situation but when you add 19-year-old Cyrus Collingwood, a native of the Island, who amuses himself by peeking into the inhabited summer cottages and snitching things, there is bound to be trouble. Cyrus considers himself to be quite able at spotting first timers and also gauging them. For instance, he would break into a cottage in the daytime when the inhabitants were away and if he found a mess - clothes strewn around, half empty wine glasses, wet towels tossed on chairs - he thought that a house treated this way suggested depression and corruption. He's an unhappy young man, and doesn't quite know why.

Suspense heightens when Nicholas suddenly comes up missing. He had gone on a walk with Greg, moved ahead and then disappeared. A search is mounted to no avail. Klimasewiski shines with his descriptions of the local constable, an Englishman, and the search party made up of Boy Scouts.

The Cottagers is a frightening yet compelling novel as the aftermath of Nicholas's disappearance is revealed.

- Gail Cooke

This book really enthralled me in a way that some of Patricia Highsmith's best books do. The story is very slow and some of the characters horribly uninteresting, the feelings the work generates are powerful and spooky.

An absolutely terrific debut. I sometimes wonder if reviewers are able to recognize when a book is exquisitely written? Because the real achievement here is the writing which is enormously astute and psychologically revealing. There's something funny, evocative or eccentrically beautiful in nearly every sentence. And I don't mean to downplay the story, which is genuinely gripping, or the characters, who feel like real people with real faults and real pathos. Cyrus, who resides at the center of the novel, is a character I won't soon forget. He may be sinister, but the writer inhabits his perspective with such skill and dark irony that I loved seeing the world through his eyes. I was captivated by The Cottagers, but I kept pausing to reread certain descriptions and observations and say to myself...Wow.

Marshall Klimasewiski's debut novel is a confusing jumble of thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable characters and really no plot whatsoever until about halfway through the book.

The town of Sooke in western Canada is a small spot that American tourists like to come to for vacation. They come up with their families and rent a cottage for a period of time, exploring the lakes and parks and enjoying the peaceful serenity of the unexploited wilderness. Cyrus Collingwood, a resident of Sooke, is a 19 year old "genius" who hasn't yet found his calling. Cyrus spends his time spying on the cottagers, and sometimes he even goes to the extent of robbing them just to scare them away from his home. When Nicholas and Samina, and their daughter Hilda, reunite with old friends Greg and Laurel in Sooke one day, Cyrus takes an immediate interest in them and their lives, incorporating his way into almost every facet of their lives. But when one of those cottagers goes missing one day, the whole community is thrown into chaos, with everyone suspecting everyone else, and the reader is given a slow reveal of the entire incident.

Basically, before the certain character went missing, I was ready to put the book down completely. The author spends most of his time examining the four old friends, and their apparent deep hatred for one another. But none of them reveals this hatred, they only do some rotten things to each other, and the reader is never given any reason as to why all these characters are such horrible people. So maybe Cyrus is a likable character? No, not at all. In fact, there isn't a single character in the novel to get behind, or even care about at all. Once the character goes missing, the novel picks up somewhat, just because we get a little more dialog and some of the characters reveal the tiniest bit about themselves. But even then the author cannot seem to focus his novel to the point of keeping the reader interested. One chapter will deal with the mystery, and will have you pretty involved, but the next will deal with something so obscure and unrelated to the rest of the novel, that you will want to throw the book against the wall in frustration.

Unfortunately, this isn't even one of those debut efforts where you can say, "well, the author did at least show some potential." There is no potential here, and nothing to enjoy either.

Carefully glean the author's intial homage - to clouds. Much like the director M. Night Shyamalan, he wishes to emerge as a ghost from his work - ephemeral. It's a style of writing that passes over you, like a swath of grey mist blanketing the rigid, unposessed yet posessive country he courts you with. His harrowing, brazen, first-person perspective into the entire cast, may at times turn your stomach with its invasiveness - that's the art here. Like a Hardy Boys novel on overdrive, you'll want to race to its finish, to leave this desolate corner of Canada, a land so foreign to we fully-paved southerners. I tip my hat to him; I would have never otherwise ventured into such territory.