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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
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Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | ELL | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Putnam Main Public Library | ELL | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE * SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE * A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019
"This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry."--Parul Sehgal, New York Times
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.
Author Notes
Lucy Ellmann's first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses, Mimi. Her short stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, and she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, New Statesman and Society, Spectator, Herald, Scottish Review of Books, Time Out (London), Art Monthly, Thirsty Books, Bookforum, Aeon, The Evergreen, and The Baffler. A screenplay, The Spy Who Caught a Cold, was filmed and broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. She edits fiction for the Fiction Atelier (fictionatelier.wordpress.com), and abhors standard ways of teaching Creative Writing, which she considers mostly criminal. Though American by birth, she lives in Scotland.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This shaggy stream-of-consciousness monologue from Ellmann (Sweet Desserts) confronts the currents of contemporary America. On the surface it's a story of domestic life, as the unnamed female narrator puts it: "my life's all shopping, chopping, slicing, splicing, spilling." Her husband, Leo, is a civil engineer; they have "four greedy, grouchy, unmanageable kids"; she bakes and sells pies; and nothing more eventful happens than when she gets a flat tire while making a pie delivery. Yet plot is secondary to this book's true subject: the narrator's consciousness. Written in rambling hundred-page sentences, whose clauses each begin with "the fact that...," readers are privy to intimate facts ("the fact that I don't think I really started to live until Leo loved me"), mundane facts ("the fact that 'fridge' has a D in it, but 'refrigerator' doesn't"), facts thought of in the shower ("the fact that every murderer must have a barber"), and flights of associative thinking ("Jake's baby potty, Howard Hughes's milk bottles of pee, opioid crisis, red tide"). Interspersed throughout is the story of a lion mother, separated from her cubs and ceaselessly searching for them. This jumble of cascading thoughts provides a remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society's storm clouds, such as the Flint water crisis, gun violence, and the Trump presidency. The narrator is a fiercely protective mother trying to raise her children the only way she knows how, in a rapidly changing and hostile environment. Ellmann's work is challenging but undoubtedly brilliant. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Ellmann tells a tale of two mothers. One is a magnificent mountain lion whose brief, increasingly dramatic appearances are rendered in lyrical sentences and paragraphs that surface intermittently like stepping-stones within a deluge of consciousness conveying the tumbling thoughts of a forty-something human mother of four in Ohio. Her Niagara of memories, worries, observations, and self-criticisms surge across the novel's many pages in one audaciously long sentence, achieving an incantatory cadence based on the refrain the fact that ( the fact that I seem to fall in love during family crises, first Chuck, then Leo, the fact that Frank doesn't count, the fact that I tried to love him ). Ellmann's smart, hilarious, high-strung narrator a former history teacher, a caterer specializing in pies, and a cancer survivor ruminates over food, family, extinction, the Native American genocide, nuclear waste, movies, Laura Ingalls Wilder, school shootings, racism, Trump, plastic-filled oceans, and polluted rivers. She adores her engineer husband and mourns for her mother, to whom the title obliquely refers. As the mountain lion's natural idyll is destroyed, forcing her on a desperate odyssey, her human counterpoint and her children also come under siege. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Ellmann's mesmerizing, witty, maximalist (think David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann), and maddening performance is a bravura and caring inquiry into Earth's glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
The Booker longlisted author on the book that made her think differently about sex - and the one that made her faint with revulsion and awe The book I am currently reading I like to have more than one book on the go but got on a train to the continent this summer, travelling so light I forgot to bring any book at all! A reissued 1950s anthology was my desperate solution at a bookstore in the Gare Montparnasse. Short stories sure have changed. These seem pretty fusty, and prone to annoying plot twists right at the end. The only story I've really liked so far is Frank O'Connor's "The Man of the House", about a boy who drinks his sick mother's medicine after walking all the way to Cork to collect it for her. Luckily, I knew Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote was awaiting me at my destination. Now, that's a fun book. The book that changed my life Valerie Solanas's S C U M Manifesto . It's not well written and it's highly repetitive but it did open up for me a whole new subversive 60s world. I still find it amusing, outrageous and gutsy. The book I wish I'd written SCUM Manifesto . And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick . The book that influenced my writing Every book I ever read - except, I hope, Hot Rod by Henry Gregor Felsen and White Fang by Jack London. The book that's overrated? All crime fiction, I don't care who it's by The book I think is most overrated/underrated Overrated: all crime fiction, I don't care who it's by. Underrated: Philip Roth's memoir Patrimony . It's not talked about enough. The book I give as a gift Maurice Sendak 's Nutshell Library . As a child I used to hide under the covers with these tiny books. They seemed all the library I needed. One features a threatening lion; another's just about chicken soup with rice in it. Confession: I wooed my husband with Thomas Bernhard's Concrete . Woodcutters might have been the better choice (it's his best, I think), but Concrete did the trick. The book that changed my mind The Story of V by Catherine Blackledge. It turns out the female orgasm is the biggest news on the planet. News that stays news. The last book that made me cry Dorothy Whipple's egregious The Priory . It's easy to make readers weep over a dying baby, and that's why she did it. The last book that made me laugh Alex Pheby's Lucia . His discourse on the tapeworm had me fainting with revulsion and awe. (But oh God, I read that a year ago! Have I not laughed since?) The book I couldn't finish If I start, I finish. Unless I lose it. I lost Gone With the Wind when I was 13, which is just as well. The book I'm most ashamed not to have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It seems so relevant to our times! What with the last remnants of civilisation crumbling all around us. I've kept these volumes handy for years but somehow I never seem to get around to reading them. My earliest reading memory Not good. I was way behind my class and my father had to give me emergency reading lessons at home: me sullen, him impatient. I assume we read Dick and Jane. I later graduated to The Cat in the Hat , Babar, and Madeline . My comfort reading "Comfort read" is a demeaning term, kind of like "cuppa" or "undies" or "jacket potato". I'm comforted by good writing: Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Molly Keane and J California Cooper.
Kirkus Review
Postmodern romp by expat novelist Ellmann (Tom the Obscure, 2014, etc.).The lioness whose tale opens and punctuates Ellmann's Ulysses-sized saga is resolutely fierce in protecting her litter of cubs, who, like her, are "too brave to despair." Not so the humans who populate Ellmann's pages, residents of a Trump-era Ohio in which there is no ground solid enough to walk on, metaphorically speaking. The narrator, a materfamilias whose voice burbles in a flooded stream of consciousness, seeks solidity: Her operative phrase, found time and again on each period-scant page, is "the fact that": "the fact that we're in for a wineless old age, oi veh, OJ, the fact that Leo has to go to Philly tomorrow and I'm not so good on my own." That may be, but much as Leo, her partner amid life's uncertainties, cares for her, she's forced to contend with difficult, distant children and everyday travails ("the fact that Trump wants to take cover away from 630,000 Ohioans who took up Obamacare last year, and if he gets away with it, some of those poor souls are possibly going to die, the fact that I'm glad we're not on Obamacare"). All this memory and reflection and agonizing comes in an onrushing flow of language that slips oftendeliberately, it seems, but too obviouslyinto games of throwaway word association: "Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, The Tales of Hoffman." One wonders why Abbie Hoffman is missing from the picture, but it's no surprise that a worried note that the Amazon is polluted should be immediately followed by a reference to Jeff Bezos. There are lovely bits of poetry and, well, fact scattered throughout these pages ("the fact that recipes change over time through forgetting stuff," "the fact that you don't want to become a bitter old woman, it's plenty bad enough just being old"), but it's awfully hard work getting at them, and for too little payoff.Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This novel from the award-winning Ellmann (Sweet Desserts) is a long, free-association, run-on sentence coming from the overactive brain of a mother of four, happily married to an engineering professor. A former college teacher herself, now a professional baker in Newcomerstown, OH, she is also a survivor of open-heart surgery and cancer. Her many obsessions include but are hardly limited to her children, especially her hostile teenage daughter; her mother (from Newburyport), who died young; pies and cinnamon rolls; injustices large and small; old movies; Donald Trump; Marie Kondo; gun violence; industrial pollution; and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Random words such as hydrangea, Djibouti, Giant Viper's Bugloss, and ducks pop up like tics in her stream of consciousness. The story that emerges from these riffs and ruminations is interrupted only by a tale about a mountain lion, which seems to have nothing to do with the main event until the two ingeniously merge. VERDICT Is it worth the considerable time and effort required to get through 728 densely packed pages to journey into the mind of this funny and insanely loveable worrywart? Yes! It's a jaw-dropping miracle.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.