Last Things - Hardcover

Offill, Jenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374184054 ISBN 13: 9780374184056

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Grace Davitt, a young girl living with her family in a small lakeside Vermont town, is drawn ever deeper into her mother's bizarre world of obsession and myth, despite the efforts of her father, a dedicated rationalist

About this title

Review:

The charisma and damage of madness gives a desperate, lyrical glamour to Jenny Offill's debut novelLast Things. Eight-year-old Grace Davitt's mother Anna is an ornithologist with a passion for knowledge. Not the sort that comes in dry and dusty lists in factual books but the intense matters of life and death with all their beauty and harshness.

Anna's imagination is inspiring, defiantly off-kilter. She paints the spare room black and draws upon it the cosmic calendar--the history of the world recreated with glow-in-the-dark stars. She has a birthday party for the earth--"it was 4.6 billion years old, so no candles, she said"--and employs a boy genius who has a dream "that one day entire cities might be illuminated by mould" to baby-sit.

Everything goes awry on a road trip to New Orleans "where there is always a parade" and where money and food and sleep are in short supply. There is the wistful hope that "someday we would drive our sweet-smelling car home, saying, We always thought of you. You never for a moment left our hearts". They do arrive home but soon after Anna fills her coat pockets with stones and drives into the lake.

Jenny Offill tells the story with a melancholy elegance; evolution, extinction and madness sparkle like stars in this wise and wonderful tale of knowledge and loss. --Eithne Farry

Review:

"A beautiful debut novel, a gently funny tragedy about childhood and madness . . . pokes at the boundaries between reason and imagination." --Newsday "Jenny Offill . . . has created a fantastical family, at times loving and sweet, sorrowful and dangerous. The prose, though told through the eyes of Grace, is sparse, elegant, and inviting." --The Boston Globe "Offill's deceptively simple prose, her exquisite sense of metaphor and her ear for humor capture the subtle perceptions of this wise child so that we feel to the bone her burgeoning awareness."--Chicago Tribune "[A] gem of a first novel." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "Offill's dialogue and quirky details are truly delightful."--Baltimore Sun

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374184054
• ISBN 13: 9780374184056
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 263