Customer Reviews

Snake

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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.

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.

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.

Written in short epigrammatic chapters, Snake bores a deep hole into the secret lives of a miserable married couple who have entered into their nuptial arrangement out of conformity to superficial social mores and pressures, resulting in festering despair. Each chapter is like a trenchant poem and indeed it did not surprise me when I found out later that Jennings is an award-winning poet. The novel's title "Snake" seems to be a metaphor for the deranged, poisonous state people become seduced in when their desperate need for social acceptance compels them to capitulate to traditions and customs (in this case a marriage with all its false promises)and after the intoxication of the ceremony and public approval wears off they must face the sobering realization that they have joined union with someone completely incompatible with them. Jennings writes with scalding irony yet at the same time maintains love and compassion for her characters.

A short, concise tale of anger and rebellion by an intelligent but ignorant young woman who awakens very quickly to the fact that she has married in the worst way possible for her. She is available, every man knows this except her husband, who is too stary-eyed to see any truth about her. Highly recommended, can be read in a sitting.

I'm trying to challenge myself and write about this book without using the word "spare".

I bought this book some years ago, but it had gotten lost in a packed box of books during a move, and I only rediscovered it last year. I'd picked it up based on a friend of mine who was a great admirer or Jennings' poetry. (Which, sadly, I have still not read.) I'm a little annoyed with myself that it took me so long to read.

It's a very short book which tells the story of a mismatched marriage on an Australian farm. It's quite a familiar story (the predictability of it was one of the flaws of the book, for me). The prose is crafted with an economy that made me wonder whether Jennings had made a bet about how evocative she could be in as few as possible words. There are times when this economy works very well-- particularly towards the end. There were also moments when it felt a little bit threadbare. A little bit not quite enough.

Reading her prose has definitely made me more interested to read her poetry. In a way, this book works better as poetry than it does as a novel. Which is not entirely a bad thing.

There is a power in simplicity. You have a story to tell, and you tell it. The language of that story is not peripheral, the language of that story - the words you choose to tell that simple story - are central: it is the integration (the symbiosis) of the right words and the purest most perfect moment that make an art of brevity.

Samuel Beckett, for instance, spent the better part of his writing life refining and refining and refining the words he used to say what he felt needed to be said (each refined piece of art taking up less space than the one that preceded it). Jorge Luis Borges, likewise (in fact: Borges famously commented that Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude could well have done with being fifty years shorter).

Kate Jenning's Snake, similarly, epitomises what can be achieved in the form of a short novel (in much the same way that William Trevor epitomises what can be achieved in the short story): over the course of just over 150 pages (and 76 chapters, some of barely a page in length), she traces out the married lives of Rex and Irene on a farm in the Australian outback, from their marriage and initial optimism through the gradual souring of the lives they share. Rather than tell us everything (rather than pin the details of this failing marriage to a calendar), Jennings scorches the details of a specific moment or pivotal event into a single chapter. As the chapters race by you, so your feelings for those involved deepen in a rather remarkable way.

First, let me say that I like minimalist books (less is often more when it comes to literature). But this novel left me feeling as if I had read nothing at all -- it's true that for an hour or so my eyes passed over a series of words strung together -- but I had virtually no reaction to what I had read