Rattlesnake Farming [Hardcover]

Kathryn Kramer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 1992

While visiting her brother, who is researching the biochemical properties of snake venom, mute Zoe+a5 Carver attempts to discover the truth about the tragedy that claimed her voice. By the author of A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this self-consciously bizarre gothic tale by the author of A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, characters from several generations evince as many peculiarities per capita as those in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. Although they're not especially freakish physically, the principals here render sane humans powerless and pathetic through their coldblooded rationality, detached behavior and calculating capacity to do harm. There's Zoe, a woman who has been mute by choice for a decade; her former high school boyfriend Robert, who stimulated her condition by causing his own father's death; and Zoe's brother Nick, who lives in a house atop a teeming rattlesnake den and experiments on venom-based psychtropic drugs while his wife dishes up snake recipes. Scenes set in the present are interspersed with expository flashbacks that trace Zoe's lineage through several witchlike women. In light of Zoe's future, references to her childhood preoccupations with torture and suffering seem especially demented--we know it isn't just a phase--and also rather irksome, which is what her sanctimonious sign language rapidly becomes. Serpents both literal and figurative and allusions to original sin and crucifixion power this strangely transfixing, narcissistically warped novel.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"One of the most ambitious, subtle novels by an American in the last twenty years." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 545 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (September 22, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679404287
• ISBN-13: 978-0679404286
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,633,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When was the last time you were surprised by a novel?, August 18, 2008

By 

Declan FitzPatrick "High School Reading and E... (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rattlesnake Farming (Paperback)

I read this book when it was first released because I took a class from the author.

Don't let the professional review put you off. The situations in which the characters find themselves are bizarre but the characters and completely human and understandable.

The thesis of the book seems to be that normal lives are full of such bizarre tragedy and degradation that it is not possible to predict how people will react or to claim that one way of responding makes more sense than the other.

Kramer deals with secrets and the effect of keeping them in her other works. This book address the secrets that we keep, or deny, or ignore as a society. She dramatizes this by creating teenage characters who look honestly at the world in which they live and are so dismayed that they have no appropriate way to respond.

15 years later I still remember vividly the scene in which the teenage daughter discovers her deep sense of betrayal that her father has kept from her the realities of poverty and inequality that surround them.

Read this book. It will surprise you.