Jane AlisonRezensionen

As hard as I tried, I just could not get into "Villa E" by Jane Alison. As some of the other reviews had mentioned, it was quite choppy and hard to follow. The premise is good as it follows the lives of Irish designer, Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect, Le Corbusier. The setting takes place at Villa E in the south of France. Others may like Jane Alison's style of writing and find this to be a worthwhile novel.

I'll admit it: part of the reason I enjoy reading midlife memoirs like "The Sisters Antipodes" is that they're usually fairly scandalous. They're good stories, yes, and often well-written, but part of the reason I like them is because they showcase instances of nearly unbelievable human misbehavior. "The Sisters Antipodes" doesn't exactly fit that mold. Its tone is literary, lyrical, almost abstract. The author raises some important questions that she can't really find answers for. Why, exactly, did her father essentially switch families with another man, and why did the mothers involved accept this bizarre arrangement? Who made the first move? What -- perhaps more precisely, who -- did she lose when she left Australia for the United States? "The Sisters Antipodes" is far from unsatisfying, but I get the impression that the author was far too young during much of what transpired to remember everything she relates here. I suspect that "The Sisters Antipodes" is one half autobiography and one half imaginative writing exercise. It seems that a couple of reviewers expected a more straightforward narrative, but, considering the profound changes she underwent during her childhood, there might not have been any other way that the author could have written this one. She mentions several failed attempts at putting her story on paper in the opening pages. Considering that she lost not just her father but also her nationality at an extremely young age, that hardly comes as a surprise. The writing here, while not always direct, is often beautiful and, on many occasions, positively heart-wrenching. "The Sisters Antipodes" may not be a wholly factual or complete account of what Jane Allison and her sisters went through, but I get the impression that the author wrote it the only way she could.

"The Sisters Antipodes" is also, in its way, a doppelganger story. After the divorce and remarriage, it could be said that the author was twinned with the girl whose father became her step-father. Their relationship is complex and often painful, but also intimate in a way that few of us could possibly understand. Alison foregrounds it to the expense of all others in the book: we hear little, for example, about her own sister and her new opposite. According to the author's recounting, she once was pretty similar to her pseudo-sister: they were both smart, pretty, ruthlessly competitive, and faced enormous emotional challenges. While the author seems to have been able to cope with the psychic damage she suffered, her complement seems to have had a much harder time of it. Although the author never articulates it, this is another one of the unanswerable questions in "The Sisters Antipodes": why did one sister thrive while the other gave way to the pressure she was put under? Were they just different people? Did they face different sorts of challenges? Or was there something in the dynamic of this strange, conjoined family that made things harder on her?

It would be difficult to say that the author is completely at peace with the events she describes here: this is the sort of stuff that keeps people in therapy forever. But, unlikely as it may seem, her family's dramatic separation gave her, in the very long run, a sort of blended family: two fathers and two mothers, and two extra sisters, even if they spent most of their time continents away from each other. Alison is too good a writer to say something as banal as "time heals all wounds": indeed the wounds are still there. But time, along with some human qualities, produces unexpected transformations. Though it shouldn't be confused with a work of investigative journalism, "The Sisters Antipodes" is as close to proof of that as you're likely to find anywhere.

Fifty-odd years in. Twenty-one floors up. J.'s life unspools in loops, a wavering sequence of repetitions: blistering walks to the store, naggingly beautiful vistas all around, purposeful swims, lustful daydreams, a faltering cat, a mistrustful duck, a few soggy dates, some mulish memories of lovers who don't deserve them, each ill-chosen man candidly, compulsively dishonest. She translates Ovid, thirty lines a day, and her work is interleaved with her life, the wet words of each story soaking through the page into the other. She has wishes and regrets, but she can't tell if they're blooming or fading away. She chats with neighbors down the hall and spies on strangers high up in buildings across the street, jogging on treadmills, whoring and johning, doing origami, each in a cube of light suspended over Biscayne Bay.

J. is adrift but becalmed. She doesn't pretend otherwise. But she's not ready to quit. Does love require luck or will? It's a question that matters to her, but does it matter enough? Alison's plot is atmospheric, but her observations are concrete. This is as it should be. What she truly nails is the way the setting of the developed Florida coast—the blazing sun, the bright sea, the towering white buildings, which upon closer inspection are revealed to be riven with cracks and pocked with decay—affects the mind and spirit. It is paradise and it is the step right before paradise, and you can't quite find your footing in either.

A couple hundred feet below, the cruise ships have become skyscrapers, dwarfing structures on land and bleeding their slop into the water. But at least they move. So now the skyscrapers aspire to be ships. J. calls her building, Nine Island, the Love Boat, a pleasure palace gone to seed, its aging pool dripping stalagmites of decaying concrete into the garage below. Comic and forlorn, much like J. herself, the Love Boat longs for the sea but finds itself stuck in dry dock.

Toward the end, Alison's plot quickly but convincingly draws into a thread. She finds ends and beginnings in a place people come to when they'd rather stay in between.

This book reminds me of some of the books I read for the fiction writing class in Greece, perhaps because it is set in ancient circumstances, but maybe because it blends more of the fantastic into the fabric of the historical setting. Giving Xenia the ability to see into the future gives the story a more comprehensive chronological sense, which is interesting as a reader aware of the variety of distances between here and Rome. The decision to spend so much time in Ovid and Xenia’s consciousness was a bit exhausting as a reader, and I would have preferred more action and dialogue. But as an authorial choice it made sense with the true topic of the story, because though framed as the story of their relationship, this is just the story of their independent characters, fiercely separated despite their intense temporary collision.

Delightful to read, and I applaud the core idea (traditional building arc is not the only or best narrative structure). Felt like it was reaching pretty far for a few of its points, and given the formal nature of a few of its premises, would have loved to have seen more in-depth exploration.

Would recommend to anyone who loves the craft/theoretical aspects of reading/writing; this book doesn't come across as dryly academic.

A thrilling work of literary criticism from a writer who very clearly loves to read. "Literary Criticism" sounds wrong, actually. Meander, Spiral, Explode isn't criticism per se. More, it's the "how to be a better reader of contemporary lit" book I've been waiting and searching for. Alison observes and categorizes the many ways fiction writers structure their work, from word choice, to sentence, to paragraph, to chapter, to finished structure. She excerpts many works of recent fiction. She observes the way the words behave on the page and shows me patterns I was only dimly aware of before. It reminds me of the best art criticism: it allows me to see/read better, with greater appreciation for what I'm experiencing as I read.

I'm sure this book will make me a better reader, more willing to let a story tell itself even when it doesn't take the expected aristotelian storytelling shape. Anyone who loves reading contemporary literature will find it enlightening.

This (non-fiction?) book is putatively "up-my-alley" (a translator of Ovid repurposes his works on love in her effort to explore and cope with her own sexuality as menopause sets in), but in the final analysis it fell flat for me. The Ovidian references were either too subtle or clever, or were too weightless to garner intrigue (which is what Ovid advises us to develop if we are to be successful at love!). Like Ovid, Alison writes with tongue in cheek about her misadventures--but unlike Ovid, her "character" J desires connection (rather than conquest) to serve as an antidote to her loneliness.

I made it to page 39 with this book. Definitely not my type of book. The author switches from translating Ovid and speaking of ex-boyfriends and living in a "retirement home" in Miami. I just didn't care any more to read the rest of this book.

When do you give up on romantic love? Jane Alison's novel Nine Island has a main character contemplating just this question as she watches life go by from her glass fronted high rise condo on the Venetian Islands on Miami Beach.

J. is translating, and sometimes changing, Ovid's tales into English. She's also a recently divorced, middle aged woman who lives with her aging, incontinent cat and has just returned to her condo after a wasted month trying to make a go of it with an old boyfriend, Sir Gold. As she works through Ovid's take on mythological stories of love and lust, she contemplates whether it's time for her to give up on romantic love. While pondering this and what it would mean for her life, she swims in the building's pool, watches her neighbors, takes care of her elderly mother, and tries to help a wounded duck. These things might feel disparate but they form the structure of her life and they come to clearly define her despite their initially perceived smallness. J. feels stranded and alone in her life but still harbors a wildness in her just like the duck she wants to rescue, a wildness that shows itself in her imaginings and her translations.

This literary novel is very much character driven and introspective. Told entirely in first person with J. narrating her own story, the story flows over the reader, with a dreamlike lushness to the writing but also a fevered restlessness underpinning the languid pace of the story. Alison manages to pull off this seeming contradiction beautifully. The novel is incredibly descriptive and the landscape, the shabby building, and the injured duck become metaphors for the loneliness of aging without connection or relationship. The novel is composed of brief chapters that tell of past and present and fluctuate in tone dependent on what part of the story they are recounting. Alison does an amazing job showing the yearning and vulnerability of an intelligent, solitary woman of a certain age. There is a taut sexuality to J.'s life, and emotional connection where it is least expected. This is a smart and accomplished novel, one that very much requires an agile and educated reader to appreciate it.½

Jane Alison’s Nine Island is a captivating look at love and loneliness. J, our narrator, is a middle-aged woman who retreats to a glass high-rise condo somewhere on Miami Beach, hiding under the glare of the harsh sun and pastel colors, where she can nurse some emotional wounds and take stock of her life. Should she give up on love? “I’m not old yet, but my heart is sick with old desire, and I’m back in this place of sensual music to see if it’s time to retire from love.”

J is recovering from a divorce and a string of ill-advised hook-ups with ex-boyfriends. To top it off she’s working feverishly as a translator of Ovid’s stories of metamorphoses. There’s not much that goes on in this slim novel except the character’s musings about her triumphs and mistakes in life, but it is so concentrated with searing emotional truth about the vulnerability of being alone and the pathos of love found/love lost that I can say it is one of the most riveting things I’ve read this year.

What makes Nine Island so compelling is that J is sharp in her observations of her inner and outer worlds. She turns the gaze not only on herself but also on her quirky neighbors. She’s reeling from broken relationships with men but surprisingly it’s the women she turns her gaze to. Ovid’s stories were about women—women chased, women violated, women transformed. She sees these women everywhere in her neighbors, her mother, and, yes, herself. The novel is a heady mix of fantasies and reflections of the past—failures, near-triumphs, happiness. In a twist of the spinster stereotype, we see her dealing with her elderly cat who is deaf, blind, and incontinent. It could veer into cringeworthy territory but the way J talks about that daily relationship cuts and burns without the hint of sap.

Water plays a recurrent motif throughout; it’s J’s work on Ovid seeping into the world around her: she swims almost daily at the pool. Puddles of rain, humidity, and tears abound. Often her interactions with others happen at the pool. It’s where she talks to others but also swims alone. This watery setting is a powerful backdrop that Alison wields with poetic precision without being precious or baroque. The tone of the book is one of a confession and jotted notes. Many of the chapters are just a few paragraphs long; some are achingly lyrical; others are razor sharp and funny; and a few are giddy, droll, and sexually playful. Interconnected vignettes—I was blown away by the range. Alison makes it all come together brilliantly.

The best thing about Nine Island is that it feels brutally honest and real. There is a tendency to overlook women who get to a certain age and live alone as not worthy protagonists. They become invisible, irrelevant, without a story worthy to be told. No children? No husband or partner? You might as well retire from life and give up. But J says ‘screw that.’ Her life is full of spark and wit and self-awareness, and she’s far from giving up.

The setting of this autobiographical novel, is the Venetian Islands, of south Miami. A place I had never heard of. (Why, we read books, right?)
The narrator, known simply as “J”, (presumably the author) is a middle-aged woman, living alone, with her elderly cat, in a crumbling high-rise. She shares with the reader, her sharp observations, about her tumultuous love life, her colorful neighbors, her ailing mother and her sexual fantasies.
I was not sure, this would be my sort of thing, but I was swept along with her bright, insightful prose and her vivid descriptions of steamy Miami. I am glad I stuck with it.

I received this book through librarything and, although it wasn't the best book I've read, it was pretty good. The references to Ovid threw me off and distracted me a bit from the story. Overall a good read though - I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under 40.

Won in a Goodreads Giveaway. I was not loving it at the start, but it definitely grew on me. Her inner dialogue was smart and honest. The prose was lovely and I truly was engaged. Also, the duck and Buster were sweet in their own ways. Quite good!

Is it a novel or a memoir? In any case, the circumstances are unusual enough: two young families swap parents. Like when the two NY Yankee pitchers did it, Jane Alison's parents and stepparents did it as well. The husbands/fathers of both families were in the diplomatic corps, which meant constant relocation and years without seeing the fathers. Each family had two young daughters; each new family produced a son. What an unholy mess, and of course the question unanswered: which parent started it? The girls compete viciously for the attention of the male parents, and tragedy and confusion reigns and not all marriages or children survive.

The writing is melodic, but this is by no means an easy read.

"Girls of eleven or twelve: Pan girls, slight, strong, and desirous. You lie still and can barely keep from breathing your self out into that darkness in excitement and yearning."

"My father's eyes lay always happy on her; between them ran a silver leash."

"This beauty exists nowhere but the current of air between the subject and your eyes...you become the seeing itself as long as you stand there and give yourself up."

"The most valuable man was the one most remote: To win him was everything."

"What we have for shells: first our mothers, maybe, and then our own skins."

"One night when I was fifteen, I'd suddenly realized that reading would always pull me out and away."

Nine Island by Jane Alison is a beautifully written reflection on life, love and lust, and on when and how to close a chapter of life.

This look at the life and loves of J, the narrator/protagonist, looks critically at the past in determining what to do in the present to arrive at a future she might desire and envision. At what point should one, or should one even, consider ending the search for love? Or even lust for that matter. The intersection of love/lust and closing chapters is wonderfully paralleled by her translating of Ovid's stories.

The book is comprised largely of many short chapters, which brought to mind another comparison in my mind. In this case it is not thematic as in contrasting J's ruminations with Ovid. Alison's writing is so poetic that Baudelaire was brought to mind. His prose poems were beautiful but not linked in a narrative manner. Nine Island is a bit like reading prose poems that also combine to form a narrative. I don't remember if she mentions Baudelaire the flaneur or if I imagined it, but the image would be very appropriate.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys an introspective book and/or beautiful writing. It raises, and offers possible answers, to many questions we face in life.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Outstanding. Ovid's tales of transmogrification set the tone for this very smart, funny, offbeat novel that muses on the male gaze, the female gaze, love, lust, loneliness, self-sufficiency, and how hard it is to care for even—or maybe especially—what you love. Including—maybe especially—yourself. It's also gorgeously descriptive, making me almost wish I'd waited a couple of months to read it in Miami, where it's set. But no matter... it's also a good antidote to a New York cold spell in December, not just tropical but generally thawing. Definitely one of my favorites of the year.

Reviewed for Library Things early reviewers;
This was not my normal read and I did struggle with it. However, as I got more into it, I followed her train of thought better. It is a strong study of people she observes and a strong study of herself and her alone-ness. There are hints of trauma in her life. However, I don't agree with her need to have a male in her life to be fullfilled. I little on the randy side for me too and that got tiresome.

I loved this book. The writing style drew me in...it is so poetic and lovely. And, the style allowed me to feel as if I really new the protagonist, J, a middle-aged woman who is thinking of giving up on love. Yet she has her work, longings, fantasies, an aging mother, a dying cat and a stranded duck to contend with. Is that enough to make a life? A deeply personal, sometimes funny, always moving portrait of a characters that is oh so real.½

Thanks to the publisher, Catapult, via LibraryThing, for a paperback copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

No names, only initials, were used is this autobiographical novel about middle-aged J, the protagonist. She is trying to decide whether to give up on love/relationships and live the solitary life on Nine Island, near Miami Beach. She has had her share of disastrous relationships, is devoted to Ovid, and spends time translating his poems. She truly appreciate the Florida lifestyle and takes advantage of all the amenities offered at her aging high-rise apartment building. She watches (with binoculars) people living in the high-rise apartment building across the way from her and imagines their lives based on what they are doing.

Ms. Alison writes with such depth/humor and made the settings seem very real. I loved the side stories about her elderly mother, her old, sick cat, and the stranded duck.

This book got off to a slow start for me but once it began moving, I really enjoyed it. With its short chapters, it's easy to put down and start again.

Described in its jacket as an "intimate non-fiction novel," Nine Island chronicles J's time in near solitude following her month-long affair with an old flame. Due to its flowing, poetic prose, this book doesn't read like a memoir, as autobiographical as it seems to be. Jane Alison's writing is beautiful, authentic, witty, and at times heartbreaking. I highly recommend this book.

The prose of Nine Island was very poetic. It read more like the musings of the main character’s, called simply J, personal diary. J’s story is very introspective. J has decided to give up on love, at least the romantic type, because she considers herself lousy at it or at the least unlucky. Despite the decision to give up on love, she still has desires, dreams and some hope and she muses on these while observing the world and people around her.

Nine Island is a quiet and reflective book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and it will surely resonant with others.

I received a copy of Nine Island in exchange for my honest review.

Very interesting. Although I must say that I now have more questions instead of less about Ovid and the Augustan Roman period. Also, I'm not sure what the stream of consciousness style did for this book. I kept expecting Virginia Woolf to jump in with her [all important] brackets. Somehow [imagine this] that took me out of the classical Roman feeling that the author so craftily evoked. Still, it was very well written and I think my struggles were through my own limitations.

shelved at: 81 : Housing / price : �13.95

shelved at: 81 : Housing / notes : Catalogue for RIBA/LFA exhibition June/July 2008

shelved at: 81 : Housing