Her Fearful Symmetry in Crazy Challenge Connection

Jun 01, 2015 Carol rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: disappointing, fantasy

It lost its way long before the weak ending.

Audrey Niffenegger's second novel is focused on time's stream. Elspeth, the aunt of two young identical twins (Julia and Valentina), dies of leukemia, leaving them her apartment which is located beside Highgate cemetery in London. The twins are Americans, having lived in Illinois with their mother, Edwina, who is Elspeth's twin sister. Edwina and Elspeth have not spoken for many years. The reason for the rift between them is a secret and is not explain It lost its way long before the weak ending.

Audrey Niffenegger's second novel is focused on time's stream. Elspeth, the aunt of two young identical twins (Julia and Valentina), dies of leukemia, leaving them her apartment which is located beside Highgate cemetery in London. The twins are Americans, having lived in Illinois with their mother, Edwina, who is Elspeth's twin sister. Edwina and Elspeth have not spoken for many years. The reason for the rift between them is a secret and is not explained to the girls.

The girls have always done everything together with Julia being the more dominant twin. They move to London and take up residence in the flat. Valentina has asthma and has a heart valve that hasn't been properly formed, making her slightly ill. Robert, Elspeth's lover, lives in the apartment below; and Martin, a man whose wife, Marijke, has left him because of his obsessive compulsive disorder lives in the apartment above. Robert works as a tour guide in the cemetery as a way of learning more for his thesis on the cemetery. Valentina begins falling in love with Robert. Robert also falls in love with her mainly due to her similarity to Elspeth. Julia befriends Martin and secretly begins giving him Anafranil (a pill for OCD), because he cannot leave his apartment, due to his sever obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Unnoticeable to anybody for the first year, Elspeth is trapped in her apartment as a ghost; invisible and mute. However, Valentina finds that she is aware of Elspeth's moods and one day, Valentina begins to see Elspeth in the apartment. The twins find a white kitten near the cemetery and name it the little kitten of death. They attempt to trap it by leaving food and milk on the balcony, but the kitten refuses to come inside. Elspeth finally catches the kitten by enticing it to the apartment with string. Elspeth and Valentina are playing with the kitten one day and Valentina sees the kitten drop dead onto the floor. They figure out that the kitten's soul has been caught on Elspeth's hand. Elspeth puts the kitten's soul back into its body and bring it back to life.

A recurring theme throughout the story is Valentina's discontent with being one half of a whole (her twinship with Julia). She is the weaker twin both physically and emotionally. Julia calls her "Mouse" because of her fearful attitude toward everything. As the story progresses, Valentina becomes stronger emotionally and decides that she must break away from Julia if she is ever to really be able to live her life.

Valentina asks Elspeth to take out her soul so that everybody will think that she has died. She tells Robert of her plan and asks him to freeze and preserve her body and then for Elspeth to put her soul back into her body so that she will be free to live her life without Julia. Julia will assume she is dead and Valentina will go on with a new life minus Julia. Robert is aghast at the plan and refuses to participate. He decides to read the diaries and letters that Elspeth left him when she died.

He finds out that there was no rift between Edie and Elspeth, but rather a secret they shared that made it impossible for them to be together again: The woman Robert knows as Elspeth is actually Edie and the woman everyone knows as Edie is actually Elspeth. The real Edie is the mother of Julia and Valentina. When Elspeth was engaged to Jack (working in London at the time), she was insecure about his love for her so she started pretending to be Edie and made advances toward Jack to test him. Jack knew that she was not Edie, but he played along.

On April Fool's Day, Jack and Edie got drunk at a party and Jack slept with her and she became pregnant with the twins. Jack did not know he had slept with Edie because he was too drunk to remember it. Elspeth marries Jack, but it's Edie who moves to America with him, and has the twins - Julia and Valentina. When the girls are four months old, Edie brings them to London, and Elspeth and Edie switch places. They thought Jack didn't know about the deception, but he did.

Novels with unsympathetic characters need to offer the reader something else: a gripping plot, intellectual gravitas, stylistic delights, something to compensate for making you read 400 pages about people whom in real life you would cross the street to avoid. With the honourable exception of Martin, who emerges as a moving study of agoraphobia and OCD (although even his resolution feels rushed and unearned), Niffenegger relies on a series of increasingly contrived twists to resolve her baroque plot, up to and including suddenly having all the characters conclude that Valentina is suicidal – despite the fact that the narrative spends a great deal of time inside Valentina's head and we never witness a single suicidal thought. Nevertheless, the novel's entire resolution depends on the reader believing this abrupt announcement.

...more

Like · see review

Oct 03, 2012 Kaitlin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015

A haunting story about twin 21-year-olds who move into their aunt Elspeth's house after the aunt passes. The aunt is the twin sister of their mother, and those two have been estranged for about 20 years. Also crucial to the story are Robert, Elspeth's loving boyfriend, and Martin, the upstairs neighbor with OCD so severe that it leads to hours-long showers, compulsive counting, and debilitating agoraphobia.

I enjoyed the victorian aspects of the novel - the creepy cemetery and hauntings most espe ...more

Like · see review