Customer Reviews

Retelling

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I loved this book. Can't wait for the next one! Stunning combo of suspense novel and claustrophobic psychological study. An exquisite torture. I highly recommend it.

This is the second book by Keller I have read. Quite gradually it wove its tentacles around me until I was trapped inside it. Two-thirds of the way through, I couldn't put it down and got so absorbed I stood up a date who was waiting for me. At first the character seems unpleasant, with a painful lack of self-awareness. Then, bit by bit, her way of seeing the world becomes your way, her fear becomes your fear, and her feeling of being trapped becomes your feeling of being trapped. Keller is a brilliant spinner of suspense stories, and each of her books (Jackpot and this one) worked like hypnosis on me. Her narrative style is seamless and builds in slow, irresistible waves. She understands that the portrayal of character is a cumulative process. No suspension of disbelief is necessary when reading this book. Without even trying, you become a part of it, as if you've been plunged into a dream. _Retelling_ is the best book I've read in years. I can't stop thinking about it.

It is impossible for me to begin to describe this novel, except to say that while reading it I kept thinking about my favorite authors. I kept thinking about Woolf's The Waves, about Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, and about Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? Quite simply, Retelling has joined - on my list - these exceptional works of art made of words. I haven't read Keller's Jackpot, and I'm still kind of wavering, afraid to be "disappointed," but curiosity, soon, will win the upper hand.

As in "Jackpot" Keller again portrays a single NY woman's psychological disintegration. The way Keller combines a Proustian attention to detail with a Kafkaesque plot and her own insights about friendship and loneliness makes for compelling reading and rewarding rereading.