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Miniatures
Reviews
"This
novel is a breathless whirlwind through the mind, conscience,
and confessions of its admittedly unreliable narrator
Fern…. Through a powerful and magical plot and
narration, Labiner unleashes on the unsuspecting reader
a witty, wild, and strong novel that leaves everyone,
including Fern, spent."
- The Corresponder
"Labiner
skillfully endows each character with a distinct and
credible voice-there is no shortage of interesting ideas."
-Washington Post Book World
"This
is a novel that hopes for a reader in an easygoing mood-perhaps
in a hammock on a summer afternoon, relaxed, playful,
with all the time in the world to linger on the author's
lovely sentences, and patience enough for a narrative
of small events and much digression."
- Book Review Digest"Labiner's
style could be compared to that of Joyce, Nabokov, or
any number of modernist novelists who dare to stray
from the conventional. Truth be told, and clichés
be damned, she has a style all her own. Coffee House
Press has an honest to goodness wonder on its hands."
-Ruminator
"A
rich novel about a young woman pulled into the mysterious
and secretive world of a famous writer and his young
wife. Allusions of the story of Sylvia Plath and her
husband, poet Ted Hughes, combine with details from
the Gothic novel tradition and witty pop culture references
to create a fascinating tapestry."
-The Utne Reader
"This
is a fat novel full of literary references in the form
of tributes to the prose styles of Marcel Proust, the
Bronte Sisters and Mary Shelly…. Labiner's passion
is exacting."
- Northtown Books Newsletter, Arcata, CA"Labiner
should come with a warning label... She is an imperious,
impish, logomaniacal tyrant, a genius and a bibliophiliac.
She outbabbles Babel. She commits textual intercourse.
She is possessed of great talent and passion."
-The Readerville Journal"Norah
Labiner has an incredibly lush, almost lascivious style...a
worthy read.
Labiner's talent is dazzling."
-The Santa Cruz Sentinel
"A
novel of great beauty and powerful intelligence. Norah
Labiner, with her graceful latticework prose and steely
analytical resolve, is an exceptionally gifted young
writer."
- Mikhail Iossel
The
New York Times Book Review"With
elliptical sentences that combine references to literature,
history and popular culture, Labiner's prose has a willfully
inscrutable, catch-me-if-you-can quality that can be
vigorous but wildly lush."Time
Out New York
"[A]
heartbreaking and vastly original tale of literary intrigue." - September 26, 2002
Kirkus
Reviews
(STARRED REVIEW)
A
haunting tale of obsessive love and buried secrets that
won't stay buried, recounted by Labiner (Our
Sometime Sister, 1998) in a hyperliterary tone
that recalls the best of Borges or Cyril Connolly.This
is one of those stories in which much of the reader's
pleasure comes from watching the author have such a
good time telling the tale. Our narrator is a highly
introspective young American, Fern Jacobi, who has finished
college and landed in Ireland at the end of an extended
tour in Europe. Short on plans and cash alike, she accepts
a job as housekeeper for Owen and Brigid Lieb, a literary
couple who have just returned after 20 years' absence
to their home outside Galway. For the precociously intellectual
Fern, the job is a stroke of luck, since Owen is a well-known
writer who is also famous as the widowed husband of
Franny Lieb. Franny (obviously modeled on Sylvia Plath)
published only one book (a novel called The Bright Corner)
during her lifetime, but she has had a cult following
ever since her suicide in 1963. Owen's second wife is
now writing her first book, a biography of Marcel Proust
(whom she claims was her grandfather), and she soon
comes to rely on the younger but more self-assured Fern's
advice as she begins her literary career. Soon Fern
becomes fascinated by the figure of the dead Franny,
and, when she discovers a cache of Franny's unpublished
letters, she begins to look more closely into the circumstances
of her suicide (or was it murder?) and her unhappy marriage
to the enigmatic and morbid Owen. She'll be guided to
a number of rather stunning discoveries about herself
and the Liebs that make her feel (literally) like a
new woman.A
splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame,
identity, and love that reaches real depths of thought
and feeling without seeming forced or pompous.Publishers
Weekly
(STARRED REVIEW)
"In
fact, one does not really need a story so much these
days. Every story hangs on the thread, hitches a ride
on the hips of all the stories that have come before." With that bon mot, Labiner (Our
Sometime Sister) introduces her outrageous second
novel, a freewheeling, over-the-top tribute to the prose
styles of such literary giants as the Brontë sisters,
Proust and Mary Shelley. Labiner's heroine is the precociously
intelligent Fern Jacobi, who interrupts her after-college
travels in Ireland to work as a housekeeper for a pair
of odd writers, Owen and Brigid Lieb. Owen is the more
experienced and successful of the two, but his track
record with women is a bit Shabby-his first wife, Franny,
committed suicide despite a successful literary career
of her own, and Brigid soon forms an alliance with Jacobi
when she feels pressured to come up with her own inaugural
writing project. The rather threadbare plot is largely
an excuse for Labiner to trot out her main calling card,
a brilliantly literate and wildly digressive style full
of literary allusions, historical references and clever
observations on pop culture. Most of these passages
are thought provoking and entertaining, but Labiner
does include plenty of overly cute and self-indulgent
stretches, along with some conceits that simply don't
work. She makes up for her shortcomings, however, by
taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through the
world of writers, culture, history and literature that
is always intriguing and often compelling. Booklist
"This
is a haunting novel…[that] achingly reveals secrets,
evokes literary figures from the Brontë sisters
to Marcel Proust, and explores biography as a literary
form."City
Pages
"F.
Scott Fitzgerald's heart stopped while he was eating
a chocolate bar. Albert Camus, who distrusted the mail,
died in a car wreck while delivering a just-completed
manuscript to his publisher. Edgar Allan Poe was found,
drunk and raving mad, in a Baltimore gutter. Having
risen early, Virginia Woolf stuffed her coat pockets
with stones and threw herself into a river. This catalog
of literary morbidity--all true stories, inasmuch as
biographers and repetition would have them so--begins
Norah Labiner's tour-de-force second novel, Miniatures (Coffee House Press). A touch ghoulish, you might think.
But it turns out to be a fitting preface for a book
that's haunted by the ghosts of its forebears: You can
almost hear Mary Shelley and poor Anne Brontë rattling
their chains in the spaces between Labiner's sentences."The
Rake
Norah
Labiner is in love with language. She writes in a great
tidal wave of words, logophilia sometimes cresting into
babble as she races to tell her story, then jumps back
to pick up a detail dropped in the rush, then joyously
forward again. Like her first novel, Our
Sometime Sister , Miniatures is a multilayered,
digressive rumination on writing as a simultaneous act
of confession and obfuscation. It's narrated by Fern
Jacobi, a young expatriate who becomes housecleaner
and confidante to Owen and Brigid Lieb, two writers
haunted by the apparent suicide of Owen's first wife,
the very Sylvia Plath-like Franny. Labiner uses the
crossing strands of narrative to explore the hidden
connections between biography and fiction, truth and
lies. Stylistically, she's something of a Gen-X James
Joyce, spinning a tale that's intensely inward-looking
and intimate in a roiling, rambling blend of soap-commercial
ditties, lovelorn lamentations and literary jokes.Speakeasy
"Miniatures is a frequently dazzling exercise…with perverse
charm…there's much richness and intellectual fun."
Minnesota:
The Magazine of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association,
Sept./Oct. 2002
"The
cascading words and references in Miniatures are beautiful and hypnotic. They flow, meander, and
entertain."
Minneapolis
Star Tribune, September 22, 2002
"Anyone
with an appreciation for innovative, poetic language
and penetrating character studies will likely savor
Labiner's experimental prose, which brims with intensity...Miniatures slams to a linguistically dizzying, Joycean end, and
a slightly melodramatic one. Yet Labiner's writing is
so full of surprises and such keen psychological insight
that you'll be glad you took this exhausting, haunting
ride."
The
Fulton Sun
"Labiner
produces a suspenseful narrative in which readers learn
about the complications and intricacies of retelling
stories, as well as the dangers involved in accepting
'facts'without questions. In the end, Labiner's work
asserts that everything undoes itself and facts quite
often contribute to the best fiction, revealing that
post-modernism-unlike Proust, Kafka, or
Frances Warren Lieb-is not dead."
Also available by this author:
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