2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Certainly worth a look............., July 18, 2005
Yellow is an intimate novel which, as good fiction should do (and in this way Janni Visman continues the work started in her first novel, Sex Education), creates a perfectly formed world for us to observe, experience, enjoy and perhaps even learn from.
This world is revealed via a first person narrative told from the perspective of Stella - damaged, obsessive, particular, acutely perceptive - who has created a precisely organised existence that has shrunk down to the confines of her second floor flat/treatment room in a London suburb.
The well choreographed story takes us through five days which dramatically change the ordered state of Stella's life and her relationship with her lover Ivan, her sister Skye and her cat, George.
Not as dysfunctional as that described in Iain Banks' scary `Wasp Factory', or as ultimately melodramatic as Mark Haddon's `Curious incident of the dog in the Night-time', Yellow completely succeeds in putting the reader inside the mind of a disturbed yet - within their own rules - rational being; which may well make you think twice about some of your own traits, but will certainly remind you - if you need reminding - of some of the complexity and curiousness of others.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Treatment for a movie someone else will have to risk writing., November 4, 2006
Narrator Stella is an obsessive-compulsive agorophobic massage therapist, almost erotically abandoned to her condition. It is never really named as a condition, which gives the story a certain twisted chic. She's got a ritualistic, almost wordless relationship (her rules) with brutish plumber Ivan: He met her on a house call and moved right in. They pare oranges together every morning; she dresses up and poses for him to more or less rape her at night. Especially now, since he's started sporting an ID bracelet with a former lover's initials on it, pushing Stella's insecurity and their S&M fetishes into monomania.
Ironically, the initials are also Stella's own. And her married sister's. Whom we also suspect Ivan might be seeing. There might be no one to trust, here, and the mystery builds. Ivan comes and goes like a tomcat. A real cat, George, is being seduced away from Stella by a lonely neighbor. (Who also seems hot for Ivan.) All these details carry more than their expected charge, not only because Stella's world is so small, but also because, in the spirit of Visman's understated writing, I don't know where we're going with any of this. It sounds more masterful in synopsis than it is.
About 50 pages in, when circumstances drive Stella to venture halfway downstairs from her flat, the panic becomes Hitchcockian--and I thought: Now we've got ourselves a movie! But in her attempt to wind the drama tightly, Visman leaves us way too few pages afterward, and expands too few scenes to keep us on the edge. And when the truth unfolds, the ticking clock just busts a sad spring.
Quick cuts and short paragraphs accelerate the story, but Visman starts right in with that before the formation of the plot, so early chapters read like empty workshop minimalism. Aside from a few painful, exquisite understatements ("Ivan is a very rich man. For a man who's supposed to be a gas fitter. For a man who deals with problems relating to gas"), the style straightjackets a potentially layered study of life. At 173 pages with lots of white space, this book reads more like the treatment for a movie someone else will have to risk writing. This sort of safe, contemporary voice is an artistically blocked convention--so careful, and starved, so wanting to be beyond criticism. It doesn't live for me at all.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
absolutely fantastic, January 13, 2006
I randomly found this book in the local library and could not put it down - I found myself reading it as if I was the main character. I passed it along to a few of my friends since and they all agreed it was delightful! Please try this book out....love, deception, paranoia, panic, obsessive behavior, I could go on forever! It's all in here...and the ending will make you wish you could be so brave (I know it made me feel that way for days...I couldn't get it out of my head!)
TWO THUMBS UP!! I CANT WAIT FOR MORE FROM VISMAN!
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