Snake [Paperback]

Kate Jennings (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

Everywhere praised for its mesmerizing intensity and taut, quick-witted prose, Snake tells the story of a mismatched couple -- Irene, ambitious and man-crazy, and her quiet, adoring, responsible husband, Rex -- who tumble into marriage and settle as newlyweds on a remote Australian farm. It is amid this unforgiving landscape that Irene and Rex raise their two children. It is here that, as Rex bears silent witness, Irene tends her garden and wrestles with what seems to be her fate. And it is here that their marriage unravels -- inexorably, bitterly, spectacularly.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Snake is the story of a marriage. A bad marriage, to be exact. The ring is hardly on Irene's finger before she begins to realize she's made a terrible mistake. Over the course of this very slim novel by Australian writer Kate Jennings, Irene's realization hardens into grim conviction. Nevertheless, she and her husband, Rex, remain together, scratching out a living and a life on a remote farm somewhere in postwar Australia. Eventually they have children, Girlie and Boy; Irene gets a job in town writing cheerful farm stories for a local paper; Rex farms and the years go by while this mismatched pair grow farther and farther apart.

There is something almost biblical about Jenning's tale--in the desolate landscape where Rex and Irene's farm is beset by locusts, snakes and other pests, in the Jobian trials they endure and in the inevitability of terrible retribution for the sin of living loveless lives. Yet the book's spare, almost flat narration saves Snake from becoming inflated by the importance of its own themes. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Sleek, stark Snake slips quietly into the reader's consciousness, then strikes with sudden venom. It tells the story of Rex, a decent, hardworking farmer, and his wife, Irene. Together with their two children, they raise sheep, plant crops, and attend Saturday dances and Sunday service in their rural Australian town. It is the 1950s, and their lives would be happily ordinary but for Irene's inexplicable and furious hatred of her husband. Irritation "grew in her like an iris rhizome, bulbous and knotted, to be divided and planted somewhere else, time and again." Her rage and her indefinable yearning to escape what she sees as a dull and mean existence propels this brief novel to its shattering conclusion. Jennings's writing is as sparse as the outback she describes, harsh yet beautiful. Each word carries force; each detail adds to the overwhelming sense of desperation; each short chapter moves unswervingly toward the final tragedy. Recommended for all literary collections. [A leading figure in the Australian feminist movement and the author of poetry, essays, and fiction, Jennings now lives in New York.?Ed.]?Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Seattl.
-?Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 157 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; First Edition edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316912581
• ISBN-13: 978-0316912587
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,184,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spare, taut, lyrical, April 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Snake (Hardcover)

The hand of the poet is evident in the elegant use of language to create tension and waste not a breath that would interfere with the stealthy creep of these characters' fate, until it breathes down their necks, and the moment of denouement is... that their lives are trivial, as are all of ours.

The haunting loneliness of rural countryside, or loveless marriage, or friendless life, is evoked cumulatively in vignettes whose collage effect remains with the reader long after this slim and beautiful book is done.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a luminous and powerful work of art framed as a short novel, February 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Snake (Paperback)

This is one of those novels that makes you feel the texture of the language itself as powerfully as it evokes place and sensibility. Kate Jennings writes with the deftness and precision of a poet, but at the same time she brings a novelist's eye to the few elements with which she works, often un-obvious ones. Jennings knows what to depict and also what to leave out, or show in shadowy relief. It's a stirring book, and an important one.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A hard life made harder; love and hate on an Australian farm, September 3, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Snake (Hardcover)

In this very brief novel (157 pages), Kate Jennings paints a bleak portrait of a failed marriage. It is written in clipped, precise
language which, like the barren land surrounding their farm in Australia, belies the content and struggle of their lives. Irene, the central character, marries Rex, a farmer, and enters a life she soon learns she despises. The story follows her through the birth of her two children, the various small activities of her life, to the dissolution of the marriage. And then the story ends.

Written in brief vignettes (the book is divided into 77 chapters, some as short as a paragraph), the story's style seems to have more in common with poetry than prose. Each word in the novel is carefully chosen; like a poem, the chapters are tightly packed, as if all extraneous detail has been boiled off to leave the densest essence of the story. By the conclusion, although quickly reached, I felt as if I had woken from a potent dream.