Customer Reviews

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I had an intuition about reading this book and I was right. It's rich, dense, withstructural decisions with which one might not agree, BUT it is wonderfully memorable, complex, a rare great read. In addition, as said in my long title, above, reading this as a writer: it's a goldmine. Because Ms. Weber carries this book with a consciousness that mixes the mundane life we all live with a literary savvy we can also enjoy (what some of us live too). To put this simply: the plot can take anyone along but the real treat is to see how an "intellectual" can create an accessible world that has so many philosophical and photographic insights also dispersed throughout. I read the middle flashback section after the first and last because I needed to keep with chronology. But, however you choose to read this, do so. Recommended for those who love a good read and recommended especially for writers. Many many tricks of the trade are embedded if one reads this with a writer's eye. Thanks, Ms. Weber, for a book that seriously challanged this non-fiction writer to reach for more range in my own work. A marvel.

Ms. Weber's book has the convention of a young woman trying to come to terms with a new love, long-buried family secrets, and witnessing a dear friend's involvement in an unhealthy relationship. But she gives the conventions a twist that are very surprising, and the result is wholly satisfying. Nice work, and I look forward to reading more from Ms. Weber.

Why isn't this book better known? What a wonderful first novel. I can't believe it didn't win prizes. It's a Harriet the Spy for grownups. And the wordplay is brilliant. Hats off! Now when is her third novel coming out?

By the author of "The Music Lesson," this almost too cleverly constructed rumination on parallax (look it up!) seems to say two things: (1) we can never really know anyone else; (2) some people simply cannot be saved. The most haunting image is that of the Holocaust-survivor psychoanalyst smiling with infinite kindness at her seemingly blessed young patient, who has already decided to die. Common threads in this and The Music Lesson include death of a child; wisdom and generosity of spirit of the elderly who have suffered; Americans in European settings they don't fully understand; profound attachments between grown daughter and father; intelligent, affluent women caught up in passionate affairs that prove degrading or just plain dangerous. What I didn't like about this one were the extended digressions into Harriet's childhood; though poignant, they seemed largely irrelevant.

Harriet Rose is in Geneva, combining a travel fellowship with visiting her best friend Anne, who had rather recently moved to Geneva to be with her married, much older lover, Victor. What Harriet finds is an Anne unrecognizable from her best friend and former roommate. . . an Anne so dominated by Victor and his subtle (and some not so subtle) controls that she ceases to have an identity of her own and exists merely as Victor's mistress.

Harriet desperately wants to rescue Anne from what she perceives as a harmful relationship. Anne is uncertain as to her to own desires and motives. Victor, the forceful former-Auschwitz survivor, has his own agenda. This odd triangle reaches the point-of-no-return as the reader waits to see just what will happen.

The novel is written in three parts. Book One is a journal of sorts, in which Harriet records her concerns for Anne, along with her observations of Anne and Victor. She writes this journal in letters addressed to her boyfriend, Benedict, and uses it as a sounding board for her concerns and frustrations. This is by far the best part of the book. Harriet's observations are witty and scintillating, and at the same time piercing, as she tries to penetrate through Anne's "strange new mistress/person".

Books Two and Three are told in third person. Book Two fleshes out Harriet's personality by giving her family background and childhood stories, cumulating in a situation not dissimilar from the one she faces now. Book Three picks up where Harriet's journal leaves off and follows Anne and Victor and Harriet to the conclusion.

I was disappointed by Anne's character. Even knowing that her true personality was being overshadowed by Victor, I never caught so much as a glimpse of "her". She appeared two-dimensional and I did not find myself as concerned for her as I should. Harriet, on the other hand, was a delightful character, full of life and enthusiasm and spirit. I enjoyed her journal immensely.

Despite my complaints, this is a solidly good book and worth a read.

This is a compelling story of two friends whose lives intertwined, widely diverged, and then were brought back together. Harriet is sincere and appealing, while Anne is something of a cipher. Too much seems to have changed for their friendship to be what it was. And each carries excess baggage from traumatic events in their families. The new men in their lives are catalysts, and the effects are devastating for one friend.

I was captured immediately by the wonderful voice the author gave the narrator. My interest never flagged.

I liked her second novel more because of the Vermeer mentions but this is an intriguing book about perception and seeing also. I look for her next book with interest. A fine writer, glad to have discovered her.

Photographer Harriet Rose, in Geneva for a month on a travel fellowship, is staying with her former roommate Anne, who had left their Greenwich Village apartment to follow her recently acquired married lover to Switzerland. Harriet finds Anne, this "strange new mistress-person" she's become, wholly changed from the woman she knew in New York, smothering under the demands of an oppressive relationship with her Victor, a fastidious, subtly abusive, toeless Auschwitz survivor. In a journal addressed to--but not necessarily intended to be read by--her new boyfriend Benedict, Harriet chronicles the absurd and dark relationship she is forced to witness at close quarters. Happily, she is an excellent observer of minutiae and a witty reporter. Of a dinner out with the unhappy couple, for example, Harriet writes:

"'I will take the steak,' Victor said to the waiter--rather imperiously, I thought. Why did it bother me so? I will take the steak. I have no toes, so I will not merely have, as others do, but I will take. I survived Auschwitz, so I can cheat on my wife and I will take the steak."

The first part of Katharine Weber's Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear, then, is epistolary, the stories of Anne and Harriet told by the latter in a series of lengthy, nicely written letters. In the remaining two-thirds of the book, related in third-person prose, Harriet's back story is fleshed out--her privileged but profoundly sad childhood, with its parallels to her current situation. Finally, the story returned to the present day, Anne's relationship with the enigmatic Victor meets its greatest challenge.

Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear is a wonderful book, layered, poignant, and beautifully written, and it comes highly recommended.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Can you trust your own perceptions? Harriet Rose, a young photographer who's just found love, goes off for a few weeks to stay with an old friend, Anne. Anne seems locked in a dangerous relationship, but is Harriet seeing the real danger? Or is her own past clouding her vision? Amazing, witty, and very, very wise. And best of all, I see Weber has a new one coming out soon, The Little Women!

I didn't quite understand when this was supposed to have taken place. For a woman in her 20's to be having an affair with a concentration camp survivor, he would have had to have been even older than her father if this was set in the last 30 years. The male character was married and had young children, so it was hard to get an idea of how old he was. I liked the character of Harriet but wasn't sure what her childhood relationship to her neighbors had to do with anything that happened later. Anne's character was annoying and I wasn't surprised at her demise in spite of her having reached out to others for help. The mirror and photography motifs throughout were interesting.