Customer Reviews

The Three Incestuous Sisters

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here it is--Audrey Niffenegger's strange follow-up to her wildly popular novel "The Time Traveler's Wife." The new book is a "visual novel" of 176 pages and can be read in well under an hour--though, hopefully, you'll spend days pouring over the gorgeous pictures. Open up the book and you find that for every picture on a right-hand page there is a brief narrative caption on the left-hand page. I can best describe the artwork as being a lot like Edward Gorey (actually, the whole aesthetic of the book is Gorey-esque), a bit like Gustav Klimt (imagine Gorey getting it into his head to do Klimt figures), and not a small bit like the art of Dominic Kulcsar on his website The Wmmvrrvrrmm Place--really, up till now Dominic is the only person I know of who made good use of floating fetuses.

And the book isn't as creepy as it sounds. The "incest" business comes in this way. . . The story concerns three lonely sisters. The youngest sister falls in love with a strange man, and the oldest sister becomes wickedly jealous, thinking that she too loves the young man. When the youngest sister becomes pregnant, the middle sister begins a mystical relationship with the fetus, becoming her unborn nephew's spiritual mentor. That's about as weird as it gets--but I suppose that's weird enough!

Actually what I noticed first was the dimensions of this book, which is basically 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches, so that it jutted out from the shelf and demanded attention. Then I noticed that the title was "The Three Incenstuous Sisters," which will certainly get your attention and that this was "A Novel in Pictures by the Best-Selling Author of 'The Time Traveler's Wife.'" What this means to indicate is not a comic book or graphic novel, but rather that each two-page spread offers a full-page illustration on the right side and a simple caption or few words of text on the left.

The drawings are hand-color etchings with aquatint, and they are the most compelling part of the proceedings. There are one hundred plates, including the first, the frontispiece that doubles as the book's cover, and the final double-page illustration, the only one included. I want to say that they strike me as combing Gerhard's attention to background detail with the coloring sensibilities of Toulouse Lautrec. I know that is but an impression and hardly indicative of any sort of competent artistic evaluation, but it might be enough to pique your curiosity. What you make of the story that is told with this pictures will end up being the greater debate.

The three sisters are Bettine, Ophile, and Clothilde, who "lived together in a lonely house by the sea, near the lighthouse, miles away from the city." Bettine, with her blond hair, is the youngest and the prettiest. Ophile is the eldest and the smartest, and has blue hair. Clothilde, the middle sister, is the most talented and has red hair. The story, which begins with a gathering storm, is divided into three part, each focusing on one sister. When the Lighthouse Keeper is killed by lightning, his son, Paris, is called and arrives on the scene. All three of the sisters experience sure signs of bad luck, so that when a few days later Clothilde practices levitation at breakfast and then Paris makes his coice and begins courting Bettine, we know this is not going to go well.

I cannot explain the way in which the relationship between the three sisters constitutes something that is incestuous, because the title appears to be provocative rather than descriptive. The net effect of reading the book is to be intrigued as to what it is all about. Granted, you can flip through the book, "read" all of captions and check out all of the illustrations in 5-10 minutes easily. Trying to figure out what it is all about will take you longer, and I am by no means convinced that there is a specific meaning to be unlocked. Ultimately, it will be Niffenegger's artwork that captivates you rather than the narrative.

The illustraton is the real strength of this book, for my taste. They are aquatints by the author, an etchinq process originally meant to imitate watercolor, colored au poupee (on the printing plate). Although Goya used it extensively and successfully, it's not common these days. As an achievement in control of the process, this is a worthwhile display of what can be done with the technique. Some plates, such as 'Haunted,' demonstrate how burnishers can be used, somewhat in the mezzotint manner. I found the drawings plain, not always the best renderings of people. The set of prints, as a whole, is still a delight, though.

The book itself is a labor of love - in the best sense, but in others as well. The author started it long before her very successful "Time Traveler's Wife," and I suspect that TTW's success had a lot to do with bringing this to life. That success may have given the author enough clout to publish a story that might not have seen the light of day otherwise, one that has meaning for her if not for others. It's like an Edward Gorey book, with one picture per two-page spread, and a sentence or two - or less - on the opposite page. There's little of Gorey's mystery, though, and none of his macabre atmosphere. Much is left implied by the epigrammatic writing, and probably a lot more than I was able to deduce. Parts of it seem to have eluded me.

Still, it's interesting enough, the pictures generally work well, and word and image add up to more than just their sum.

//wiredweird

I hate to say it but I think had Niffenegger not written the best-selling "The Time Traveler's Wife" that this book would have never been published. There were several images I liked very much, in particular when Clothilde communes with her unborn nephew and the drawing where birds circle her head each with a strand of her hair in their beaks which reminded me of Frida Kahlo, but this book seems more like uninspired "outsider art" than anything else. Niffenegger writes at the end of the book that she wrote "The Time Traveler's Wife" when she should have been working on "Sisters." All I can say is that I hope she decides to write a sequel to "Sisters" and then interrupts that project to write another incandescent novel like "The Time Traveler's Wife."

but then again, what should you expect when you know that the author is going in a completely different direction from her previous work? I loved Time Traveler's Wife, like many people, and I was excited about the prospects of a new Niffenegger book. Still, I knew that it was going to be different; I just didn't know how different. The problem with this isn't that it's different. Three Incestuous Sisters is a decent little Gothic-esque story, with a few strange forays into magical realism territory, but in the end, it just feels like a let down. The images are interesting, but as a whole, the book doesn't hold up. It should be evocative but settles in at curious. Worth a quick look I suppose.

From the moment I saw the cover of this book, I knew I had to have it. I don't know why. It just resonated with me in some odd way, that delicate rendering of three sisters in a bed. Maybe it's an archetypal thing. There's something about a group of three sisters that brings to mind three fates, three Norns, three Gorgons, three Weird Sisters on the heath.

The mythic quality of *Sisters* continues throughout the story, with the sisters' idyll shattered by the arrival of a man named Paris who elicits jealousies and rivalries. He chooses the sister who is considered the prettiest. This leaves one sister bitter and bent on revenge, and the third woman bound strangely to the unborn child of the new couple. The story takes surreal twists and turns of various sorts, which I'll not spoil here.

If you go into *Sisters* expecting a novel in the usual sense, several hundred pages of densely packed text, you will be disappointed. This is something else entirely. Read this book if you're interested in sublime and strange artwork, and in a story that is bare-bones but works on the level of archetype and myth.

Essentially, this is like one of those richly illustrated fairy tale books you had when you were a kid, except it's for grown-ups. I'm going to treasure mine.

This is a lovely, hauntingly drawn illustrated novel about three sisters who love the same man. It is a story of passion, jealousy, and devotion, along with regret and forgiveness. It is obvious that the author of the Time Traveler's Wife is an accomplished artist along with her fine narrative talents. I recommend this book highly.

After reading The Time Traveler's Wife,I had to buy this.I really enjoyed the book. The artwork is beautiful and strange. The story itself is a little disturbing and sparse. Regardless of that, I really enjoyed reading it. I have flipped thru it three times and everytime I find something that I missed before. The book is nice and big, not what I expected at all. Even if you do not like the story the artwork alone is worth buying the book for. All in all, to me it was a great purchase.

Audrey Niffenegger defines this book as a "visual novel", and that's exactly what it is. It's not a book to read, but the book to look at - think about art albums. Look at the cover , flip the pages - if you like the aquatints (as I did), you'll enjoy the book - it's gothic, it's mystic, it's weird... and yes, it is a little bit too creepy for my taste.
Anyway, even for somebody who has not read "Time Traveller's wife" it is obvious that the author is very talented artist, with weird imagination (isn't this what you expect of all of them?)
On the other hand, I do agree with one of the reviewers who said that if not for Niffenegger's first novel, this one would not be published. I guess it is not because the book is bad , but because it is way too strange to appeal to most of people.
On the funny side: my seven years' daugther picked this one from my desk before I could do it, read it in 20 minutes and concluded that she liked the book. I really hope now that she meant the pictures, and not the story itself...:-)

This is a stunning piece of artwork. There were a few pages that I considered cutting out and framing. The art is dark, deep, and honest.

The story lacks in some areas but it is made up for in the artwork. A great conversational piece or coffee table book.