Far

by Victoria Lancelotta

A dark, unsettling novel about a woman whose reluctance to adopt traditional female roles of marriage and motherhood results in a painful alienation from her Italian-American family and community.

Written with Lancelotta's characteristic passion and wit, Far is a haunting exploration of what it means for a woman to be alone in her family, her house and her body, even as she is hemmed in by them.Martha is single, in her early 30s, and has lived in Baltimore all her life. But she is late to do what they all expect her to do--marry and have children--and is instead involved with Edward, a man chosen precisely because she believes that he expects none of these things from her. When she begins to suspect otherwise, she accepts a new job in the small-town South. Martha yearns to be free of the sense of having disappointed her family--and just about everyone. But the ache for resolution proves too strong. As Martha discovers a growing intimacy between Edward and her sister, she's forced to take responsibility for her isolation.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 2003

About the author

Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways To Disappear: Stories was the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Contest winner. She is also the author of Here in the World: 13 Stories, and
the novels Far and Coeurs Blesses. Her short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and magazines including Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and others.
She has been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Fellowship, multiple Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Reviews

[calico Rosenberg]

this book is just so me. when i read the title and summary, I thought it sounded like somethign i would write. and a token example of something i seem to forthemost seek from reading, the sort of relating i have found none of in actual people/life. i suspected it then and confirmed quite early on that the reviews on the jacket, (an element of books i despise for several such reasons), seemed entirely irrelevant and of course didnt come close to gettnig anything, even things i didnt feel you had to 'get.,'
there were times i really had to put it down because of what it evoked, more for stirring memories than representing the feeling, but still--the book captured some of what ihave felt to be the strongest feelings in my life quite effectively, if subtly, like how i feel about traveling and driving and the dynamics in the edward conflict, that relationship was epitomal of anyo f my own, the way i do things that people, to me, seem oddly incapable of grasping--while i dont even realize its something that needs to be grasped. i do t hink it could all have more blown me away, but im not sure when i wont think that about a book. finally, consequently, the ending, (that one line that came out of nowhere even though it was led up to the entire novel), was just so perfect.

[Jillian]

Find this book kind of absurd for me.

[Я.]

Very easy to identify with.

[Foreign]

French editor: Daniel Arsand