The Effect of Living Backwards [Paperback]

Heidi Julavits (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

Does Alice really hate her sister, or is that love? Was she really enrolled in grad school, or was that an elaborate hoax? Is this really a hijacking, or is it merely the effect of living backwards?

Following her acclaimed debut, The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling new novel about two sisters, a bizarre event, and the elusive nature of truth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Effect of Living Backwards, Heidi Julavits's second novel, is a mess--but a good mess, an ambitious mess. The title is taken from Through the Looking-Glass, and Julavits's narrator--named Alice--certainly wanders into a perplexing wonderland. She and her sister Edith are flying to Morocco, where Edith is to be married. The plane is hijacked by a charismatic, chubby blind man named Bruno. After a time, the hijacking appears to be an extended moral case study: Bruno forces his hostages to consider whether they would give their own life to save another. The hijacking, it turns out, may or may not be real; Bruno may or may not be blind; Alice may or may not be falling in love with Pitcairn, the hostage negotiator who's supposed to save them all. As she unspools her black comedy, Julavits displays a wildly discursive style; the book can seem overwritten. But as her plot gains momentum, so too does Julavits's writing, and her tortuous sentences begin to make sense: they reflect the awkward situation of the heroine. After a supper of candy and punch, Alice tells us she and her fellow hostages "suffered extreme intestinal discomfort, which made the lavatories more unspeakably filth-ridden, and tempers, whose foulness is always proportional to the decrepitude of a WC, began to fester." On one level, this is an unhappy sentence; on another, its very contortions are funny. So it is with The Effect of Living Backwards, which, in its patience-trying elegance, recalls the underrated novelist Nancy Lemann. This is a brave novel, aggressively intelligent and aggressively silly all at once. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

When contentious half-sisters Alice and Edith board a jetliner en route to Morocco, where Edith is to be married, they step unknowingly into a vortex of international intrigue when the jet is hijacked-or is it? As events unfold, the motives for this act of "terrorism," apparently a high-stakes stunt being pulled by one of two factions from the International Institute for Terrorist Studies, become ever more murky. In the futuristic and fantastical world of Julavits's second novel (after The Mineral Palace), which takes its title and epigram from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the political and familial machinations we recognize from our own contemporary lives scramble into a kaleidoscopic puzzle. Julavits's rambling surrealism is overlaid and intensified by a strong dose of paranoia … la Pynchon, and the political and the familial merge in the form of a game from Alice and Edith's childhood called "shame stories," in which others are convinced to tell their darkest secrets. These tales, told by the sisters' fellow travelers, are fascinating excursions, a blend of the bizarre and the everyday. But as Alice's wastrel father tells her, "People don't want to be surprised. They want to hear the same story. Tell them the same story and they'll listen," and Julavits follows this advice herself. Beneath its absurdist trappings, her larger tale is surprisingly conventional, its real focus the sibling rivalry between Edith and Alice, shadowed by the terrorism subplots and the veiled references to September 11, or the "Big Terrible." Neither the novel's imaginative framework nor Julavits's cool, unerring eye for detail can quite compensate for its curiously mechanical emotional trajectory.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade; 1st Printing edition (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425198170
• ISBN-13: 978-0425198179
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #824,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Heidi Julavits was born in Portland, Maine, in 1968. She graduated from Dartmouth College and has an MFA from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, the Best American Short Stories, Zoetrope, among other places. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, and the Best American Travel Essays. She is a founding co-editor of The Believer magazine, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Ben Marcus, and their two children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Readable, clever, but without direction or heart., January 7, 2008

By 

David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Effect of Living Backwards (Paperback)

clever, readable, but ultimately a sterile exercise in cleverness with nothing at its core. The reason I found the book so irritating is that, having read through the 350 or so pages, it led to nothing at all. There is no there there in this over-clever, emotionally empty, confusing dog's breakfast of a book. As a story, it doesn't work - the plot defies credibility in so many ways it's an embarrassment. If it's meant as some kind of parable or allegory, it can't be said to work either, as one has no idea at the end what bizarre point the author might be trying to make.
Characters are implausible ciphers, or mouthpieces for specific ideological points of view, and exposition is so murky at times that the reader cannot even figure out what has or hasn't happened.

As co-editor of 'The Believer', Julavits is on record as decrying the 'snarkiness' of many reviewers' response to modern fiction. She makes a plea for a kinder, more understanding, reception to work that takes risks, that is more experimental in nature. While I have some sympathy for her point of view, it does nothing to alter the unfortunate fact that this particular book is a confusing, disorganized mess. It fails to meet two fundamental criteria that a novel should satisfy: a coherent, credible plot and plausible, well-drawn characters. No amount of skill with language can make up for these deficiencies.

A disappointing failure.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars **Great Style, Good Characters, Confusing Story-line**, April 7, 2004

By 

OhSayCanYouSee1 "ohsaycanyousee1" (Elmhurst, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Effect of Living Backwards (Hardcover)

This novel is very different. The story premise is unusual, timely and interesting. It is a black comedy describing a pair of sisters involved in an airline hijacking experience. You never know if the hijacking is real, staged or something in between.

I really wanted to love this book. There is so much promise in this writer. Her prose is amazing; she seems to understand and utilize words that sound almost musical in her sentences. I found myself looking to the dictionary on multiple occasions, fascinated with the vocabulary and syntax. Unfortunately, the plot and story development, do not demonstrate the same level of maturity.

Author Heidi Julavits' shows she has extraordinary potential, having a remarkable ability to piece together interesting phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. If the plot of this novel was more substantial, or the two sister's characters were better developed, this would be a very good work. Instead, we are left with an interesting book, that leaves you puzzled about what you read when you reach the finish.

I generously rate this book at 2.75 out of 5.00 stars, rounded up to 3.00, for beautiful use of language, creativity in subject matter and a nice job in approaching the story. However, it rambles on in its linguistic beauty instead of really delivering a strong plot or climax. If this writer learns to finish as well as she starts, I believe we will see many other interesting works to come.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars weird, weird, so very weird., March 16, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Roberts-Zibbel (bowling green ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Effect of Living Backwards (Hardcover)

I can definitely understand the 1 or 2 star ratings being given this book by other amazon.com reviewers; I have very mixed feelings about it myself. There were parts I enjoyed: the interplay between the two sisters, the interesting post-Sept.11 theorizing, the fact that the confusing plot did draw me in and didn't want to let go. What I didn't enjoy was that the reader can never distinguish what is real and what is not, who is "good" and who is "bad," whether the whole hijacking was set up as a study on how passengers react to certain aspects of terrorism or whether the whole BOOK was set up to see how readers react to certain aspects of bizarre and overzealous writing.

I liked the terrorist attacks on the US being referred to as "The Big Terrible" (which Julavits credits to Thomas Freidman in her acknowledgements) rather than the ubiqutous "9-11," and I also liked the creative hijacking story of a rugby team overpowering their captors and crashing the plane when it wasn't necessary (resulting in stickers posted in all airplanes saying WHEN TO OVERPOWER YOUR HIJACKERS). However, much of the writing about the terrorism school seemed contrived, as though Julavits was trying a little too hard, and the battle between the two factions there didn't make a lot of sense to me.

_The Effect of Living Backwards_ certainly held my interest, and in all I'd say that it was a good read. At times the writing was just a little hard to wade through... and I'm still trying to decide if the effort was worth it.