Mouthing the Words: A Novel - Softcover

Gibb, Camilla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786709669 ISBN 13: 9780786709663

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2002

Synopsis

By turns harrowing and hilarious, this adroitly narrated winner of the Toronto Book Award re-creates the world in the imagination of Thelma. It's a world in which she can escape some of her more painful childhood realities, like those games her father likes to make her play, where he's the boss and she the naughty secretary. And her mother so fiercely favors her younger brother, the cherubic Willy, that Thelma finds herself perpetually in emotional exile. No wonder Thelma asks practically every adult she meets to adopt her. Along Thelma's bumpy way from a rural English village to Canada to a law degree at Oxford, she meets many potential parents and even makes some friends, but it is with the companions of her fertile imagination-with the scaredy-baby Janawee, moody and timid Ginniger, and big, strong, stoic Heroin-that Thelma finds comfort. With them, too, she loses an already tenuous connection to reality, though ultimately Thelma's spirit and humor prove to be as indomitable as her wit. "Moving and comic at once.... Hallucinatory, hilarious, and haunting."-Boston Globe "Prickly, unsentimental...a portrait of terrible comic humanity."-New York Times Book Review "Mesmerizing.... Lush, visceral prose ... rings with an authority rarely found in first novels."-Washington Post Book World "A novel of astonishing power .... An instantaneous classic."-Baltimore Sun "Elegant ... sings with an almost Victorian delicacy and sophistication."-San Francisco Chronicle

About this title

Review:

We trust that what we know to be normal is normal simply because it is known to us. Worlds meet in collision and the coherence of our histories crumble. I feel it in the blank looks I tend to receive at dinner parties. When other people recount stories, I habitually interject with statements like, "Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I used to feel just like that when my father held me over the bridge by the armpits."

So begins Camilla Gibb's debut novel Mouthing the Words, the compelling account of one young woman's years of abuse. When Thelma emigrates with her English family to Canada as a child, she packs away a large assortment of imaginary friends: there is Heroin, who is "the biggest, the bravest, the most grown-up"; Janawee, who cried an "awful lot because she was scared of almost everything" and Ginniger, who "sometimes played mother, sometimes Heroin's baby girl and sometimes Daddy's naughty secretary". Thelma's fertile imagination is blamed for a lot of things, particularly her rather elaborate stories about Daddy. Granted access to Thelma's inner world, the reader cannot turn a blind eye and is consequently spared nothing. This is not easy reading but Gibb's simple, lucid prose conveys the horror of the situation without ever reducing it to the voyeuristic. In her mind's eye, Thelma can turn into a stick insect, pinned to the ceiling, "safe there and rigid and tight and looking down on the immense world below" and an icicle "hard as ice, and as shiny and beautiful and clear as pure water" while her father stays down below with the other Thelma.

Gibb's exquisite prose translates a harrowing world of child abuse, mental illness and institutionalism into the most startling, powerful imagery with such simplicity and directness that she leaves you in awe. The episodes in which this spirited, puritanical child clashes with the grown-up world are sometimes hilarious, always poignant, with occasionally heartbreaking results: "I am eighteen and I am still not adopted. How many people have I asked? Mr Foster my biology teacher took that as an invitation to stick his tongue in my mouth--and after that, well, that was only recently, but I've decided to give up". Camilla Gibb's debut novel Mouthing the Words is not only a testament to her ability as a writer but testimony of a voice that all too often goes unheard. --Nicola Perry

Review:

"Gibb seduces the reader with sparky prose and charming storylines before drawing us onto a heart-wrenching rollercoaster ride" (Guardian)

"Beautiful and compelling... an insightful and humane exploration of the space between reason and imagination" (The Times)

"This is a bold and ambitious debut from a writer who sows the seeds of great promise" (Daily Express)

"Fresh and original" (Sunday Times)

"It's sassy, it's smart... Go girl!" (Jeanette Winterson)

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0786709669
• ISBN 13: 9780786709663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252