The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - Hardcover

Vida, Vendela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062110918 ISBN 13: 9780062110916

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2015

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.

In Vendela Vida's taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport--all of her money and identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities--she knows she'll never recover her possessions. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.

A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she's inhabiting the actress's skin off set, too--going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving further and further away from the person she once was.

Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller--an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman's right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida's most assured and ambitious novel yet.

About this title

Review:

"[Vendela Vida's] finest book...With its echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith, this novel is full of darting pleasures."--New York Times

"A brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being... Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida's astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again."--Booklist (starred review)

"Vendela Vida's work is utterly compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written. Reading her inspires me, and reminds me of how powerful the novel can be - how addictive and vital - and of how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as her comes along."--George Saunders

"Like Bowles' despairing, existential "The Sheltering Sky," Vida's novel penetrates the psyche of an American traveler when confronted with an alien culture and landscape.... [A]n emotionally precise and absorbing meditation on how grief can divest us of our most fundamental sense of self."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Every woman writing literary thrillers gets compared to Patricia Highsmith once if she's lucky, but this is one of the few times it's felt to me like a hopeful comparison. After this, I'll read anything Vida writes."--Chicago Tribune

"Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It's also insanely funny.)"--Lena Dunham

"Smart, thoroughly engrossing, funny, and even a bit disturbing. ... Part mystery/thriller and part absurdist/postmodern novel with a feminist slant, it is simultaneously funny and serious."--New York Journal of Books

"You will tear through Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, this wry, edgy, philosophical thriller, this love child of Albert Camus and Patricia Highsmith, this sly satire of Hollywood, this entertaining journey through the vast desert of identity and regret."--Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

"Unequivocally a thriller, but more movingly, a meditation on identity."--Vanity Fair

"The novel packs a wallop, taking the themes of Camus and Kierkegaard and transplanting them into a story with the pace and intrigue of a page-turner... A speedy and suspenseful fish-out-of-water tale with a slyly philosophical bent."--Kirkus

Book Description:

'Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar... (It's also insanely funny.)' Lena Dunham

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062110918
• ISBN 13: 9780062110916
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224