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ELEPHANT WINTER

Name: ELEPHANT WINTER
Author: Kim Echlin
ISBN: 0-7867-0610-4

by Kim Echlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

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Touching on the travails of birth and death among elephants (and humans), Echlin offers a tender, mesmerizing account of the last stages in a mother and daughter’s relationship. Called back from Zimbabwe, where she—d been studying cave paintings, Sophie returns to her native Ontario to aid her mother, terminally ill with cancer. The family home, bordering on a small safari-zoo, provides Sophie with fine views of elephants making their daily march from the barn into the snowy fields beyond—and not a bad view, either, of their male keeper, Jo Mann. She and Jo fall rather quickly into bed and then into an easy relationship. As part of the tale, Echlin surrenders an inventive “Elephant-English dictionary,” a tome Sophie is creating based on her infrasound audio recordings and bits of which, highly idiosyncratic and anecdotal, are interspersed throughout the story (a particular elephantine expression of longing, for example, reminds Sophie of the last lines of an Ezra Pound poem). Sadly enough, her growing fascination with the elephants, and her pregnancy by Jo, coincide with her mother’s decline; once a vital person, as well as an artist, the dying woman now simply withdraws into the seclusion of her room. Amid their sometimes disquieting, sometimes soothing routine, Sophie listens to her mother reminisce about her long-ago life in Paris. Then the dark presence of Alecto intervenes: an elephant researcher, he won his reputation by shooting elephants in the wild for the autopsy opportunities to be gained. The climax—a heady convergence of Sophie’s mother’s death, an attempted rape, and an elephant charging—ends up leaving Sophie alone at last with the elephants and her new daughter, settled and purposeful. A sometimes emotionally scattered debut, but the intriguing lore of the big-tusked, long-trunked quadrupeds transforms it into a lovely treatise on the noble compassion of animals.

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-7867-0610-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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NOTICE

by Heather Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2004

Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge...

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Posthumous work by the unflinching Lewis (The Second Suspect, 1998, etc.) offers a chilling glimpse inside the head of a young prostitute forsaken by family and lovers.

Living in an unnamed suburb in the well-appointed house of her absent parents, who seem to care not at all what she does, first-person narrator Nina (her professional name) begins to turn tricks in the parking lot of the local train station. Details emerge in nonchalant fashion, described in a deadpan voice. Nina has had some experience with drugs, and she’s been locked up, possibly for psychiatric reasons. Her actions, which at first seem innocent or helpless, soon turn needy and ugly. Then Nina meets the customer who decides her fate, a rough guy who takes her home to his fancy house (“going up the driveway seemed to take longer than getting there”) to meet his good-looking wife (“nothing suburban or matronly going on, which was a decided relief”). Rough trade turns to horrible as Nina is forced to witness the man’s sadistic treatment of his spouse before he turns on her. Shockingly, Nina comes back for more, motivated by true human sympathy for the wife. Ingrid’s self-loathing prompts Nina to stay with her and even to suggest that she try to make a break and get away. The two women begin a love affair that stirs the apparently influential husband to vengeance; he has Nina arrested, then incarcerated in solitary confinement, which probably would have lasted forever if not for the loving intervention her counselor and therapist, Beth. The story constantly piques your expectations, but the denouement is never assured, though you’re sure it will be gruesome and brutal. Despite her penchant for slurry colloquial sentence fragments, Lewis is an enormously compelling writer: astute, risky, and unapologetic.

Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge of emotional oblivion.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004

ISBN: 1-85242-456-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECOND SUSPECT
by Heather Lewis

- BOOK REVIEW
HOUSE RULES
by Heather Lewis

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LASHER

by Anne Rice ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1993

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The sequel and conclusion to Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) shows Rice both at her best and at her hackiest. Volume One brought forth the Mayfair Witches, an incestuous family in New Orleans' steamy Garden District, headed by supersurgeon Rowan Mayfair, who is putting some of the family's seven-and-a-half billion into the Mayfair Medical Institute. At that novel's end, Rowan had given birth to an "entity" on the living-room rug that, assuming human shape, had nearly killed husband Michael in the swimming pool, then abducted Rowan. Now the evil being—which looks like Durer's Christ and has been using witches in the Mayfair line to have itself reborn after dying time and again since the earliest days of the Reformation in Scotland— is skipping about Europe while trying to breed with Rowan and give birth to a female demon. But these porny pages don't arrive until we wade through 200 tediously undramatic sheets of dialogue filler quite lacking in storytelling oomph—though we are treated to teenygenius Mona Mayfair's seduction of the recovering Michael. All this is a case of background detail turning story into tapestry. Once Rice plunges us into Rowan's long rape, two miscarriages, and at last the birth of Emaleth, sister/wife for Rowan's demonic son Lasher, the novel lights up with rocket blast. How will Rowan escape her tyrant son, whose endless suckling and inseminating keeps her constantly orgasmic and horrified? But pigging out on Rowan's plight takes up only about 200 pages all told, and then more background filler—well, the novel's huge mythic underpinning- -dims our spirits, although the story of Uncle Julien, as told by Julien's ghost to Michael, dances nicely. Too much Rice-A-Roni, but addicts will lick the pot.