Seizure

by Erica Wagner

Book Overview

Raised by her father, Janet is shocked when she learns that she has inherited a house from her mother, long thought dead. The key in hand, Janet travels north to an old stone cottage at the sea's edge.Tom hides away in an old stone cottage at the sea's edge, waiting. He was raised by his mother, traveling from one place to another, his only stability the stories she told him--stories of shape-shifters, danger, impossible love....When Janet arrives,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393331970
• ISBN13: 9780393331974
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

"You went to meet the story and the story came to you."

Janet is with Stephen, cocooned in what appears a contented relationship in London. Recently, the seizures of her childhood have returned, reawakening an eerie sense of time that accompanies such "incidents". But when she is contacted by a solicitor, who delivers the key to a beach-side cottage she has inherited- her mother has died- Janet cannot wait for Stephen to free himself from obligations, rushing to the cottage. Suddenly, nothing makes sense to Janet; her mother has been gone since she was three, the intervening years filled with her father's stories until the silence of his death. Meanwhile, Tom has returned to that small patch of ocean view after years of wandering. Now he waits for he knows not what, only waits with expectation. And Janet, in her car, drives toward him. Everything is symbolic: Janet's restlessness, Tom's quiet patience, the inexplicable state of their awareness, as though each has been searching for that other part to make them whole. Both are steeped in stories, one from a father, the other from a mother, tales of longing, of dreams, of leaving, of leaving behind. Janet's impulsive escape from her life is surprising, discarding the surety and comfort of Stephen in London, seized by the siren call of a dead mother to retrieve time and place. Janet arrives, confronted by Tom, who refuses to leave. The pieces of this puzzle are ragged, not smooth, difficult to fit together; yet they possess a rightness that appeals both to Janet and Tom. She brings with her a wildness she had not known existed, he a recognition; "The cord between them... wound in her grasp, around her spine, around her heart." What is the difference between fable and truth? For Tom and Janet, their worlds have been shaped by fanciful tales, often dark, stories of disappearing mothers and sad fathers, of love so desperate as to stain the soul. The pair is unable to disengage, enchanted by memories and an attraction so deep it cannot be denied, blood of blood, bone of bone. In a seamless narrative that spans only a short time, the two collide, no longer of the world in this place by the sea, unmoored by their stories and the power of their truth. Often, the prose is exceptional, perfect: "Two lovers can sleep on the blade of a knife." How is it possible to disengage so readily from everything real, to disappear into a cloudy past and embrace the shadowed fables of childhood? It is as if prince and princess have wrapped themselves in the mantles of the wrong characters. Touching on truth they cannot bear it, so far have they traveled down this path that it is impossible to turn back, As though through the unfocused membrane of remembered stories, the plot is concentrated, driven ("Hold me tight and fear not.") truth as necessary as fable. Suspend belief, reside for a time with these people in a cottage by the sea, entangled in what cannot be, but is: "Everyone who told the story would end by saying: Do not go there." Luan Gaines/ 2008.