(hb; 2015)
From the inside flap:
". . . a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. Almost immediately, while checking into her hotel, she is robbed, her passport and all identification stolen. The crime is investigated by the police, but the woman feels there is a strange complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities—she knows she’ll never see her possessions again.
"Stripped of her identity, she feels both burdened by the crime and liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone at all. Then, a chance encounter with a film crew provides an intriguing opportunity: A producer sizes her up and asks, would she be willing to be the body-double for a movie star filming in the city? And so begins a strange journey in which she’ll become a stand-in—both on-set and off—for a reclusive celebrity who can no longer circulate freely in society while gradually moving further away from the person she was when she arrived in Morocco."
Review:
Diver's Clothes is a love-or-hate novel. Vida not only tells the story through a second-person point-of-view (told in the present tense, with lots of "you"s), but her protagonist -- a flighty, irrational woman -- often makes bizarre, ill-advised decisions that may be off-putting to some readers. (The reasons for the protagonist's irrationality are eventually, somewhat revealed.)
Normally, a book like this would not appeal to me. What compelled me to read Diver's Clothes was that I am a fan of Vida's work, which consistently has an exotic surreality, a dangerous dreaminess to it, as well as her swift-paced, turn-on-a-dime storytelling. Also, this book has the feel of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, where the protagonists plunge headlong into unpredictable situations whilst panicking -- and trying not to think too long on the consequences of their wild, criminal decisions. (I am not the first person to note this; the same person who made the Vida-Highsmith connection also suggested an Alfred Hitchcock link, which makes sense: Hitchcock filmed a loosely adapted version of Highsmith's Strangers on a Train.)
If you can get past the second-person POV and the protagonist's bad decisions (which threaten to bury her even as their repercussions amass), this is a hard-to-put down read. The tale's finish is open-ended, keeping with the tone of what precedes it, with Vida providing sufficient foreshadowing to suggest that this, too, while a bad choice, is also an exhilarating (and character-true) one.
Borrow it or check this out from a library before you buy it, if you are iffy about Diver's Clothes: better to spend money on something where you are fairly certain you will like it.
(hb; 2010)
From the inside flap:
"Twenty-eight years ago, Peter and Yvonnne honeymooned in the beautiful coastal village of Datça, Turkey. Now Yvonne is a widow, her twin children grown. Hoping to immerse herself in memories of a happier time - as well as sand and sea - Yvonne returns to Datça. But her plans for a restorative week in Turkey are quickly complicated. Instead of comforting her, her memories begin to trouble her. Her vacation rental's landlord and his bold, intriguing wife - who share a cruious marital arrangement - become constant uninvited visitors, in and out of the house.
"Overwhelmed by the past and unexpected dislocated by the environment, Yvonne clings to a newfound friendship with Ahmet, a local boy who makes his living as a shell collector. With Ahmet as her guide, Yvonne gains new insight into the lives of her own adult children, and she finally begins to enjoy the shimmering sea and relaxed pace of the Turkish coast. But a devastating accident upends her delicate peace and throws her life into chaos - and her sense of self into turmoil. . ."
Review:
A dreamy vibe suffuses Vida's emotional (but not bathetic) tale about a woman who's adjusting to her new life and evolving outlook regarding her family, and situations, past and present. Many of Yvonne's clarifying moments are brought into sharper focus by her quiet revelatons, as well as external, surreal events and elements (I particularly appreciated Vida's inclusion of the owl and the fairy chimneys in this wise, humane and exotic tale).
Worth owning, this.
(hb; 2003)
From the inside flap:
"A sharply humorous, fast-paced debut novel about the effects -- some predictable, some wildly unexpected --that an encounter at gunpoint can have on the life of a (previously) assured young woman.
"The gun in question is pointed at twenty-one-year old Ellis as she walks through a New York City park. In the end she is unrobbed and physically unharmed. But she is left psychologically reeling.
"Over the next few weeks Ellis keeps everyone at bay: the police, the men who want to save her ('the ROTC boy' poet and 'the red-faced representative of the world'), and the university therapist who hints that her sweaters may be too tight. But when Ellis accompanies her mother, a nurse, on a mission to the Philippines, she finds that life -- even if held up -- cannot be held back, and neither, finally, can she."
Review:
Vida's debut novel is not as good as her second, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. And Now has its quirky, clever moments, and starts off in a tightly-written manner, but it quickly becomes obvious that for all of this novel's slyness, this should've been a novella. Few of the scenes in that make up the middle section of the novel have anything to do with Ellis's experience with the sad gunman: they're superfluous. It's just a semi-edited ramble, albeit a charming one at times.
Skip this one, but make sure to check out Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.
(hb; 2007)
From the inside flap:
“On the day of her father’s funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn’t her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and now Clarissa is alone and a drift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiancé, Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life-changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa’s world become myths and rumors, and she is catapulted out of the life she knew.
“She finds her birth certificate, which leads her from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle, to mystical Lapland, where she believes she’ll meet her real father. There, under the northern lights of a sunless winter, Clarissa comes to know the Sami, the indigenous population, and seeks out a local priest, the one man who may hold the key to her origins.
“Along her travels she meets an elderly Sami healer named Anna Kristine, who has her own secrets, and a handsome young reindeer herder named Henrik, who accompanies Clarissa to a hotel made of ice. There she is confronted with the truth about her mother’s past and finally must make a decision about how – and where – to live the rest of her life.”
Review:
Northern is an offbeat, melancholic and delightful book. What thrilled me the most about Lights is not so much what Vida wrote, but what she didn’t write -- that is not to say that she does not bring this story to life with vivid images and effective understatement. Readers who require their authors to spell everything out for them should probably avoid it; readers who do not need to be spoon-fed their entertainment should check it out.
