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Narrated by Shelly Frasier
Kathryn DavisUnabridged — 7 hours, 1 minutes
Narrated by Shelly Frasier
Kathryn DavisUnabridged — 7 hours, 1 minutes
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The Thin Place, Davis's sixth novel, is that rare, brave and original thing: an honest and energetic glimpse into an author's head. It's like being holed up with some crazy old nun. She's never dull but won't stop talking, filling every sentence to the brim with observations and reflections.
—The New York Times
In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man’s corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town’s every waking moment. The experiences of Mees’s dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister’s wife reading her morning paper and “confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight.” In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it’s just another moment in a particular place.
No amount of character sketching or plot summary, however, can begin to convey the experience of reading this strange and delightful novel. Davis gives voice to anything that's alive—Mees's dog, a beaver enjoying a swim, lichen—and juggles human and nonhuman perspectives as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Her narrative includes police logs, horoscopes, garden almanacs and disembodied meditations on creation. Somehow in Davis's hands none of it seems outlandish or self-consciously eccentric.
—The Washington Post
Davis's unconventional style of writing this novel is not well-suited to the audio format. Chapters are told from many different characters' perspectives, and the narrative jumps around from past to present. Since Frasier does not vary her delivery or do much to differentiate the voices of the characters, it's easy to lose the thread of what's going on. The novel frequently tosses in "list-style" items, such as police logs and daily horoscopes, which are slow, distracting and repetitive when read aloud. Frasier's cool, objective voice matches the author's narrative tone, but it makes such potentially exciting scenes as a gunman taking hostages in a church flat and dull. The strength of the audio medium is in its intimacy and emotion, the ability of a talented reader to bring characters and stories to life. A novel such as this, told in the detached tone of an impartial observer, does not play to the medium's strengths. It works better on the page. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 17). (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Taking place in the small town of Varennes near the Canadian border, this novel features a Jane Austen-like country setting and a Virginia Woolf-like sensibility. It begins with fifth-grade friends Mees, Lorna, and Sunny finding a seemingly dead man on the beach and ends with an attempted murder in a church. In between, Davis (Versailles) chronicles an affair between an older man and a younger woman, beaver trapping on the local lake, a 93-year-old-woman's birthday party, and a grade school class play, among other things. While these events form more of a chronology than a plot, plot really isn't the point here. Instead, Davis takes the events and characters of a recent small-town spring and uses them for an extended meditation on time and mortality and the mysterious web of connections among all things. While the end result could have been a bit too airily "spiritual," Davis's focus on commonplace activities within the community keeps the novel firmly grounded. Recommended for all literary fiction collections.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Metamorphosis, resurrection and the mysterious ways in which all living things are connected are the themes of Davis's homespun magical-realist sixth novel (Versailles, 2002, etc.). Its setting is Varennes, a quaint little town on the Canadian border whose inhabitants all know one another as well as they know both their own domestic animals and the latters' wild counterparts. With lordly omniscience, Davis takes us inside all these creatures' thoughts, following an arresting opening sequence in which a dead man is revived. Preadolescent Mees Kipp's life-giving "power" (first discovered when she was three, and since honed by conversations with periodic visitor Jesus) is only one of the many mysteries of growing up-as her girlfriends Lorna and Sunny only dimly comprehend. That the world is an infinitely varied, bountiful and threatening place becomes progressively clear to everyone in Varennes, including bookbinder Andrea Murdock (through whose research we learn of the long-ago "Sunday School Outing Disaster" that claimed several of the town's best and brightest); sexually hyperactive sexagenarian Piet Zeebrugge and his mother Helen, who languishes impatiently in the Crockett Home for the Aged; love-starved Billie Carpenter, who devotes her untapped energies to humanitarian and environmental causes; Mees's perpetually misbehaving malamute Margaret; a beaver targeted for annihilation by a charismatic trapper; and many others. Davis leads her characters-human and animal alike-surely toward another potential "disaster" on Pentecostal Sunday, mingling numerous seriocomic incidents with summary statements that reveal a cosmic vision that can instantly charm you, then stomp all over you (e.g.,"Water has more properties that are beneficial to human beings than any other substance. Also it can drown you"). The quirky, immensely gifted Davis has been compared to Kafka, Dinesen and Hans Christian Andersen. One might also say she is to contemporary fiction what Emily Dickinson was to 19th-century poetry. A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis's best yet.
"The quirky, immensely gifted Davis has been compared to Kafka, Dinesen and Hans Christian Andersen. A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis's best yet."
Varennes is a fictional town in upstate New York where the rules of space and time are suspended and miraculous things occur. Kathryn Davis gets inside her characters’ humanity, innocence, and terrible secret evils, exposing the humor and tragedy in each life. Shelly Frasier’s quiet, unassuming narration allows Davis’s graceful images to cast their spell. Listeners are treated to a poetic landscape, with waking daydream the primary reality. Frasier handles the voices of dogs, cats, beaver, and lichen as calmly and matter-of-factly as she does those of preteen girls and ancient women. Asking the big questions and offering truths most people would rather avoid, Davis’s story brings imaginations to tingling life. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940171296674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2006 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
At the lake the trail branched right and left. Right to the town beach, a grassy plot with six picnic tables, two stone grills, a pit toilet, a trash can, and a narrow strip of lumpy gray sand. Left to the Knoll, where the overlarge houses of the rich nestled among shade trees and tasteful redwood play structures-and then back to town. Straight ahead was the boat ramp and the Crocketts' chocolate Lab, Buddy, going down shoulder-first on a dead fish. Beyond the ramp was the water.
The sky was the palest blue and fluttered over the girls' heads like a circus tent at the apex of which the sun was pinned. It was a Saturday in mid-May, the sun only just starting to heat up, it being the northern latitudes, but even so Mrs. Kipp had made sure they all wore sunblock. You couldn't be too careful. Like many objects of worship, the sun had grown impatient with its worshipers, causing some of them to sicken and die. As she larded on the sunblock, Mrs. Kipp informed them that these days only stupid people had tans.
When they got to the beach, the three girls came to a halt. A very large man, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and not much else, was lying on his stomach in the sand with his head facing the lake. From where the girls stood, they could see the bottoms of the man's feet, which looked smooth and white. Almost as if he were a baby, observed Lorna Fine, not only the tallest and least attractive but also the most fanciful of the three. The older Lorna got, the prettier she would become, but for now she was like a bespectacled monkey wearing red-and-yellow plaid seersucker pants and the vintage Ramones T-shirt she'd found in the back of her brother's closet under a stack of dirty magazines, so she was sure he wouldn't ask for it back.
Sunny Crockett let out a loud sigh Lorna knew was meant to be overheard by anyone inconsiderate enough to be hogging the entire strip of sand when obviously there were other people who wanted to use it.
"It's Mr. Banner," said Mees Kipp.
"Who?" Lorna asked.
"Mr. Banner," said Mees, "from Sunny's church." She walked around to the man's right where she planted herself, a small round thing in a pink tracksuit, in the sand next to his face. Mr. Banner's eyes were loosely shut, and his black eyeglasses were shoved up so the left lens was wedged over the bridge of his nose, which was bruised and bleeding. His mouth was partly open, and a little foamy drool was coming out of it; there were several blackfly bites, the first of the season, on his bald head, and four long fine hairs were growing out of the middle of his nose halfway between the bridge and the nostrils.
Noon. The sun shone down; Mees leaned closer. Mr. Banner smelled like perspiration but also sweet like cotton candy, and there was something about him, about the way he lay there so perfectly still yet with a sense of something enormously alive inside him, something almost insanely teeming with slumberous hidden vitality deep inside, that made her feel like she was looking at a cave full of sleeping bats.
"Don't," said Lorna, when Mees reached out a finger. "Don't touch him."
"Germs?" guessed Sunny, but Lorna, a great fan of Agatha Christie, shook her head.
"I don't think he's breathing," she said. "Look at his chest." Tentatively she held her hand near the man's nose. "I think he's dead." The sand was coarse and gritty, the entire beach hard as a rock. If there were any footprints, Lorna couldn't make them out, though despite the trash can, there was a lot of trash on the ground, including cigarette butts and a beer bottle. Molson. Canadian.
"We should do something," said Sunny. "We should get help."
"You get help," said Mees. "I'm staying here."
"It's not like he's going anywhere," Lorna pointed out, but once Mees had made her mind up, forget it. "Just try not to touch anything," Lorna added sternly. "Okay?"
Of course Lorna knew perfectly well that the minute she and Sunny were out of sight Mees would do just that-it had been so obvious, her hand visibly itching to touch the man's cheek.
"Sure," Mees said. She nodded her small round face, a face that, no doubt due to its exceptionally round dark eyes and full bow lips, its fringe of dark hair and pronounced widow's peak, tended to remind people of a pansy. Such a sweet little flower, with such a fierce expression!
Mr. Banner, Mees was thinking. Mr. Banner Mr. Banner Mr. Banner Mr. Banner.
Think of me. That was what Pansy said in The Language of Flowers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis Copyright © 2006 by Kathryn Davis. Excerpted by permission.
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