Customer Reviews

An Invisible Sign of My Own: A Novel

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

From the moment I started the beginnings of this book, I found it absoultely irresistible. In fact, I found it very complicated to even put it down. I read through it in most of one sitting, even denying myself the simplicity of water.

Aimee Bender gives us a wonderfilled, poetic story about Mona Gray. A woman, turned 20, obsessed with numbers and good luck. This incredible story reaches far into the reader, taking a life of it's own deep inside, even though far from insouciant.

A must read for Plath lovers, as parts of the novel remind me of Esther Greenwood (The Bell Jar), and in reality, these two could have been best of friends, or better yet...worst enemies.

Bender turns obsession and compulsion into a moving story of a woman that knows too much...and too little.

I loved Flammable Skirt so when I heard Bender was writing a novel I bought it immediately. I love it! She delivers on the promise of her stories in a way I wouldn't have imagined. The darkness that was present in the stories about the Ice Girl and the Fire Girl or The Rememberer, is deeply explored in this novel. The novel has a weighty sadness which is revealed through the prism of Bender's magical language. In terms of what it has to say about family too, this book is both frightening and relevant. I am so happy to spend a whole book with her characters.

Coping with dying is difficult, but this book gives the reader an interesting perspective on how one can go on living when someone close to them is ill or dying. Wearing our heart on our sleeve, or a number on our chest, doesn't guarantee that we'll be noticed or treated differently. Mostly, we are left to deal with life's troubles on our own. However, if we find like-minded souls in the world, and we reach out to them, we can help each other embrace our time on earth as a gift, while at the same time letting go of those who must move on. Although this story has many weird aspects and quirks (which I find refreshing), it also holds an important message for anyone who cares to notice.

Displaying an even finer blend of the virtuosity she gave us in her fabulous debut story collection, THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT, Ms. Bender has concocted a fable that seeps into the reader's heart and spleen. She pulls you into her reality and makes you see the world through her poignant, painful, compassionate and downright hilarious prism. Take this ride, if you like your fiction to set off tiny concussion bombs in your heart rather than just telling a mildly compelling story.

I must admit, the setup that Aimee Bender constructs is fascinating: a girl in a claustrophobic town with a strangely beautiful glass hospital quits everything she adores until her routine is disrupted by the threat of her carefully sheltered world coming crashing down. However, the array of what start out as endearingly delicious quirks in Mona and the townspeople can't sustain themselves and become tiresome and forced by the end of the book. I simply could not find it within myself to care for the fates of any of the characters, whose actions and fates are all too trite and predictable.

The most frustrating thing about this book is glimpsing the potential that it failed to live up to. The book seems to awkwardly straddle the line between the grippingly realistic and the delightfully dreamlike. It would have been effective either way, but in the middle ground it seemed to take, An Invisible Sign of My Own was dull and bizarre.

One of the many plot weaknesses pertains to Mona's professed adour for math, which seems to supplemented by a knowledge nothing more complex than long division, despite a high school education. And the question of Mona's education leads to a entirely new debacle of how she is qualified to be any sort of teacher. This could very well be nitpicking, but Bender certainly doesn't seem to have done her research or have constructed a world convincingly magical enough for a reader to overlook illogical characterizations and plot twists. Mona herself comes off as irritating in her self-destructive self-pity rather than sympathetic. Her students are laughably (and not in a good way) precocious, wholly unrealistic without being interesting, and not at all endearing. Her love interest has little depth besides the plot device role he is assigned.

I could not help thinking of the whole plot as a uncompelling and unskilled rehashing of Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, which I'd have gladly reread rather than waste my time on this one. This whole book reeks of trying too hard.

This novel is really unique and extremely well written. It combines magical elements with very real ones and touches upon the fears and insecurities that are part of the human condition.I'll never look at a bar of soap again in the same way. Read this book and find out why!

I hate giving this novel a bad review because I really enjoyed Bender's short stories, but this novel is just awful. Aimee is trying to accomplish too much. She has too many characters (and none of them are ever filled in completely) with conflicts that are either shallow or stupid. Basically, I don't think Bender can pull off her cuteness in long form. It just got old after awhile. I just wanted her to get down to business, but she continued to skim over the relationships between all her characters in favor of cutesy situations. The protagonists of Bender's tales are starting to meld together into a big nutty mess. Cover it with sweetness and it makes a good candy bar, but it makes a terrible story.
There were a lot of chapters in this novel where nothing happens. And there were chapters where a lot happens and you're left thinking, "who cares." Mona eats soap: who cares. She buys an axe: so what. She sees a movie and kisses the science teacher: big deal. Am I supposed to believe that a character who goes around knocking on wood throughout an entire novel is interesting? I mean, that was the only characteristic that didn't make Mona Gray cliché. Booooooooorrrrring! Step out the door and throw a rock and you'll hit any number of psychotic women who think their lives are unfulfilling and are unwilling to make the effort to change. I certainly don't want to read about one. Which is another thing: Mona comes from a clean, nice suburban middle-class household. She's handed a great job (even though she isn't qualified for it). She has three squares a day and a stressless day to day routine. Yet, she acts like the world is crashing down. Please! I'm sick of whining, moaning Monas in novels, stories and movies. Get over it, ladies. The world doesn't end because Walgreens ran out of Raspberry lip balm.
Don't make the same mistake I did: do yourself a favor and skip this novel in favor of something worth reading. Two suggestions: What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges or The Burning Women of Far Cry by Rick Demarinis. Both feature a disgruntled first-person narrative, but with real conflicts and interesting insights.

I have to admit that I did not enjoy the short stories that Aimee Bender told in "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt." I picked this one up, however, because I was curious if her novel would be better than the short stories: and oh, was it. Short stories just aren't for me, and I'm so glad that this book was written. I loved every second of it.

What I love about Aimee Bender's writing is that it's so fearless. She's not afraid to over-simplify or to exaggerate or switch tenses mid-scene, and she's not concerned with many of those silly conventional rules of English (for example: 'Don't start sentences with "And" or "But" or "So"'). She gives herself license to exercise that freedom in the prologue, where she makes clear that These Are No Ordinary People and This is No Ordinary World that we're going to be dealing with; she sets up a necessarily imaginary place (in which there exists a secret to eternal life) with characters that can't be real, but are somehow still really human. So once the novel gets going - and we find out we're going to be following around an old guy wearing his moods (as numbers) around his neck, witnessing an untrained math teacher teaching with a severed limb and an axe, and spying on a romance founded on one person's intuitive understanding of another (not intellect, not physicality, not shared passion) - we're willing to accept it immediately and without reservation.

The characters in 'Invisible Sign of My Own' are all kind of vulnerable and achy and over-exposed. They wear their insides on their outsides (Mr. Jones' numbers, Mr. Smith's acid burns, Mona's gray eyes) and are afraid to express aloud the majority of what they think/feel. That seemed lifelike to me - certainly much more lifelike than the confessional dialogues you find in books like 'Pride and Prejudice,' in which characters accurately and eloquently describe their hopes, loves, and dreams to one another regularly and openly. Benders' characters are all quirky and neurotic, rather than archetypal, and that too seemed lifelike.

Bender spares us a lot of the details. We don't know the names of the characters' brothers and sisters, or what instrument they played growing up, or what books they read in their free time. Instead, we learn to identify each character by one thing: Mona knocks when she's anxious, Mona's mom likes to dream about traveling, Mona's dad has lost himself. Sometimes this reduction - this simplification of personalities, histories, and lives - can be illuminating, but sometimes it can be disorienting (too far removed, perhaps, from experiences we've had in this life, this world, where complexity is king). Personally, I think her style tends more toward being insightful and induces a healthy amount of self-reflection. It makes you ask yourself what your 'one thing' would be (what single, defining trait motivates and informs everything you do?), which in turn causes you to consider the issue of how you are defining and redefining yourself every day by every one of the things you do and don't say, do and don't do.

I probably did this to myself. I read Bender's novel back to back with reading her book of short stories, The Girl In the Flammable Skirt. The problem is this: I feel Bender used lots of the little character quirks she came up with for her short stories in her larger work, the Invisible Sign Of My Own. To me, it was cheating.

The book read fairly well, and it was quick and quirky, but what I didn't like about it was that it reused things from other stories, if not directly, at least in spirit. She definitely took the "knock on wood" thing from an earlier short story of her own.

This all aside, I liked the writing, and felt it really worked well for me.