 |
Review
Considering the critical and commercial success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Niffenegger's second novel has a lot to live up to. Within its elegantly written pages are familiar themes: Dysfunctional families with terrible secrets, love overcoming great obstacles, and life after death. As you may expect, the author takes these conventions and breathes new life into them. Her Fearful Symmetry is dark, labyrinthine, beautiful and unexpected.
Audrey Niffenegger is a superb writer, and her prose kept me reading, even when the mundane activities of everyday life began to stretch the narrative a bit thin. The first half of the book allows the reader to really get to know the main characters, twins Julia and Valentina, the ghost Elspeth, and the two other tenants of the London flats where they live, Robert, the lover, and Martin, the upstairs neighbor suffering from OCD. In addition, the proximity of Highgate Cemetery is organic to the story, the perfect backdrop for the emotional drama that unfolds. The latter part of the story is compelling, and while I tried to anticipate what the characters would do, I was taken completely aback as events unfolded.
All the characters in one way or another live in twin mode, an existence forced into uneasiness by their efforts to live in overlapping realities. In the end, one is left with the idea that one world (or identity) can mirror another, but no one can live in both worlds at the same time.
|
