Wanna read a truly messed up little novel by someone who tends to be seen as charming and wry? Here you go.
There was a moment about three chapters in where I was decidedly taken aback by the revelation of the opening sentence. I was both hooked and appalled (more or less, I find it hard to be appalled but this worked).
Anyway, this is a story about a woman of about 30 (I will get to that) who gets on a plane from the north of Europe to a southern clime looking for the right man to meet. She takes almost no luggage, seems deeply unattached to the world, and the book bares out the odd choices by the end. And again, this book gives you a kind of heads up early on that this is a decidedly dark and twisted story.
The book begins with the young woman feeling insult and umbrage in being offered a cheap, “stain-resistant” dress by a salesgirl. This, like all scenes until the very end, provides one of a series of cryptic clues about what is even going on in this story.
Here’s the start of the second chapter:
“Lise is thin. Her height is about five-foot-six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted, a very light streaked lock sweeping from the middle of her hair-line to the back, and is styled high. She might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six, but hardly younger, hardly older. She has arrived at the airport; she has paid the taxi-driver quickly and with an expression of abstract eagerness to be somewhere else. Likewise, with the porter, while he takes her bag and follows her to the desk to have it weighed-in. She seems not to see him.”
What strikes me most about this passage and fundamentally shifted my reading of the novel is that the narrator simply does not know much about its character, not her age, her height exactly, or whether or not her hair is colored. And this drew me right in because it showed me how much more I would have to do to makes sense of things. I found it very effective and very appealing.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Drivers-Seat-New-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811223019/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1549735454&sr=8-2)