Amazon.com Review
Who is Jane Stevenson, and how does she know all this stuff? With
Several Deceptions, this hitherto unheard-from British academic has unleashed a brilliant debut collection of four wicked, chatty novellas. If her astonishing range of milieu is anything to go by, Stevenson seems to be a Tibetan monk who studied European law at a prestigious Dutch university after swinging with David Bailey in '60s London. So firmly does she grasp all these different worlds--and quite a few others--you feel that she must have lived them. Her first novella, perversely titled "The Island of the Day Before Yesterday," tells of an Italian semiotician who, in the 1980s, decides to play a little new-historical prank on the academic community by passing his dumpy secretary off as a former '60s wild child. In Stevenson's world, though, the first laugher is never the last. In the second novella, a really beautiful piece of writing called "Law and Order," twin brothers fall under the spell of a powerful law professor at the University of Leiden. The author writes a vaguely sardonic--but dead-on--pastiche of aristocratic European student life. This Mann-ishness is shot through with scenes of aching loveliness, as when she describes the skaters on the canal: "From a distance, their modern dress did not call attention to itself, and the whole composed itself into a series of Breughelesque pictures, softened by the snow which fell in fat, soft, feathery flakes from the dark sky."
The third novel, "The Colonel and Judy O'Grady," takes us further afield still, to the foothills of the Himalayas, where two exile communities bump up against each other: the "strange and pathetic group, known, collectively, as the Ancient Britons," left behind by her Majesty's retreating Empire and Tibetan monks fleeing religious persecution. Stevenson, bless her, is alive to the absurdities of the situation: "The shaven heads and the Panama hats met periodically in the bazaars, like animals at a watering-hole, with an entire lack of mutual curiosity." The final story, "Crossing the Water," sets in motion a wild Feydeau-ian farce involving three art historians and a manly soldier in a Suffolk country house. Despite her diverting fictional globetrotting, maybe Stevenson had better stay at home in future: this last story is a corker. The farce is hilarious, the denouement heart-wrenching. But what's most wonderful is the knowing tone. The narrator observes of his art-historian friend: "Adam knew, of course; his omniscience was legendary. I sometimes scrounge dinner with some friends in Hampstead who keep a list of things he doesn't know: it is short, and peculiar." Fans of the shifty narrations of Francine Prose, John Lanchester, and Michael Frayn will find much to love in this new voice. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
The nature of the self, and how it mutates, is a recurring theme in the four novellas making up London-born Stevenson's smart debut. In "The Island of the Day Before Yesterday," pretentious Italian semiotician Simone Strachey is summoned by the Sunday Times to organize the estate of his dead father, a minor member of Rome's literati. The humorously erudite protagonist goes to London and hires a frumpy secretary to help sort through the papers, but he soon gets his comeuppance amid Stevenson's delightfully nimble turns of phrase. When Simone, misguidedly altruistic, decides to pretend that "Dreary Dora" was a member of the late Strachey's glamorous scene, she winds up posing as Simone's effervescent, underrated wife, a '6os cult figure, and steals the show. "Law and Order" is a dark glimpse into the unraveling relationship of twins Henrik and Florian, who, while studying law at the University of Leiden, fall under the spell of a professor who has frightening views about crime and responsibility. "The Colonel and Judy O'Grady" chronicles a grad student's infatuation with exotic Ananda, formerly Judy O'Grady and currently a Buddhist nun who has erased her past. The creepy "Crossing the Water" is a sinister finale, with unemployed artist Oliver on a lake trip with a bunch of upper-crust art historians whose class snobbishness may play a part in their incipient tragedy. Most of the book's characters are highbrow Europeans, and their diction may be off-putting to some readers. But Stevenson realizes the hilarious parodic effect of their ultra-proper intonations, especially when she places them in deliciously vulnerable situations. (Sept.) FYI: The author's upcoming novel, London Bridges, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2001.
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