Volume 53, Number 8 · May 11, 2006
The Way We Lived Then
By Claire Messud
The Last of Her Kind
by Sigrid Nunez
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 375 pp., $25.00
Sigrid Nunez is a memoirist of considerable gifts, which is worth remarking only because she is the author of novels rather than of memoirs. Her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God(1995), is the fascinating account of a young woman's childhood and adolescence in the housing projects of Staten Island, poignantly detailing her immigrant parents' challenges and isolation, and her own desires to dance and to become a writer. For Rouenna (2001) chronicles her rediscovery of Rouenna Zycinski, whom she knew slightly as a wild child during those Staten Island years. The two become lively acquaintances, if not wholly friends, until the woman's sudden suicide, which prompts in the narrator a vivid imagining of Rouenna's time as a combat nurse in Vietnam. Using an intercutting of meditation and careful reconstruction, she has written an impassioned and complicated recollection transformed, by the author's skill, into a work of fiction rather than of history. Both novels are marked with the authority of lived experience, and readily acknowledge that authority. Their scope is not large, but their effect is profound.
Review, 3270 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |