Customer Reviews

The Dark Sister

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't believe that there are no reviews of this novel! Rebecca Goldstein is a fascinating writer: to jump from novel writing to a probing study of Kurt Gödel is not what one expects. This novel is a quantum jump (ahem) from her first two, which are (good) academic tales. It is not an easy, linear read (as she says, she presumes a lot from her readers), but extremely evocative, picking up on themes from the earliers ones. If you don't mind being challenged (if you like Iris Murdoch, for example), give it a try. Can't wait to read the later ones.

This is the 6th book I have read of Goldsteins', and it is definitely the creepiest!

For the first time, her protagonist is not beautiful - quite the contrary; Hedda is grotesquely ugly. Hedda is the author of complex 19th-century prose involving two sisters that turn out to be the same person along with the character William and his brother Henry James. Much of this novel is Hedda's book interchanged with what happens in Hedda's real and psycological life - which takes place in an old light house.

The back-and-forth between Hedda's prose and real existence is sometimes challenging to read, and I found her real life so much more intriguing and readable than her book. There is very heavy language at times - I felt like I missed a lot here and there; however, more often I felt so detached from the story that I did not really bother to reread what I might have lost... Other times Goldstein's language sparkles, which is why I enjoy reading her so much.

All in all, this story did not grab me all that much. Jewish references (another Goldstein trademark) were scant and not seemingly conclusive to the story. The Dark Sister was not a bad book at all; however, of Goldsteins' it is probably my least favorite...

I've never reviewed a book on amazon.com before, but feel compelled to rate this one, since it deserves, and so far lacks, a "five star". Hedda, a feminist writer with a barren social life, finds an isolated tower to write a new book. Her characters inhabit her, or she inhabits them, drawing her into the world of William James and a mysterious woman astronomer, unexpected revelations, and a range of unusual mental, maybe even psychic phenomena.

A bit difficult to read at times, but completely compelling. The first time I tried to read it could not get past the first chapter. The second time, I reached the second chapter and was hooked. I knew nothing about William James, and still know little, but this is not a drawback. Keep a dictionary handy for words like "embrocate" as you enter the prose of the nineteenth century.

The above title to this review is Yiddish for mad, insane. I did not know this word before reading the novel within a novel that constitutes this novel. I did not know many words that I now know in the following languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French, German, and, mirabile dictu, Polish. But the word accurately describes both the form and ultimate effect of the novel that consists of one "dark sister," Hedda, writing a novel about the Jameses (William and Henry) and another dark sister. Actually dark sisters abound as do, of necessity, dark daughters - "mia figlia scura" as one father addresses his progeny. Need I say that if the reader can't be bothered to look into all these matters, he/she might as well not bother with the book? It is full of - Goldstein's word - cerebrations in a potpourri of languages and situations that bedazzle. But the novel is essentially, to quote from it, one of those compositions that "arouse a response almost too stingingly poignant within those whose inmost souls are - even in a life crowded full of family and friends, students and colleagues - dyed in the tones of solitude."

"All fiction is autobiographical!" says one character herein. And the effect of all this metafictional, mind-turning hopscotch stylistics in the book was but to cast the focus ever more intensely on Goldstein. There is no sense, in a sense, to be made of this work. It very much reminded me of Iris Murdoch (another Philosophy professor) in certain parts. But Murdoch's sapience quickly degenerates into moralisms whereas Goldstein's keeps spinning into the deep, dark miasma of the universe and soul, and, important this, she pulls it off!

The book has a dark, swampy undertow permeating it. That's as close as I can come, or desire to come, to describing it. One might as well try to "define" this Emily Dickinson quote in the book:

"Ourself behind ourself, concealed
Should startle most -
Assassin hid in our apartment-
Be horror's least-"

As Hedda/Goldstein puts it:

"How can we think eternally to maintain ourselves when personal identity is, even while we live, a plumped-up phantom, a frightened fiction by which the vast majority of us try to keep the wider sea from breaking through?
But it shall break through. Sooner or later, for us all, it shall batten us down and break us through."

I tried to think of a reason to give this book only four stars, but, after much reflection, the only valid one was that I wanted it to continue swirling and gyring through my mind. I wanted more of it!