In the Language of Love: A Novel in 100 Chapters - Softcover

Schoemperlen, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014025238X ISBN 13: 9780140252385

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1997

Synopsis

In this astonishingly inventive novel, Diane Schoemperlen uses the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test as a narrative framework for exploring her heroine's growing understanding of the meaning of love. A tour de force of wit and wordplay, In the Language of Love is a wise and compassionate collage of one woman's coming of emotional age.

About this title

About the Author:

Diane Schoemperlen is the author of Our Lady of the Lost and Found; In the Language of Love; and five short story collections, including Forms of Devotion, which won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1998; and The Man of My Dreams, which was nominated for a Governor General's Award and a Trillium Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Joanna is a collage artist, an appropriate calling for the protagonist of one of the finest montages of language to head south from Canada since Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. In her first novel, Schoemperlen (author of The Man of My Dreams, 1990, and three other story collections) has taken 100 words from the 1910 Kent-Rosanoff Word Association Test and used each as a chapter title. The result is an elegant pastiche of forms that conveys-in non-chronological free-association-the story of Joanna's everywoman life. Unlike Joanna, who "begins to see her life in sections... so that [except for her parents] none of the characters from one stage leak forward into the next," the narrative bleeds across time: one chapter tells of all the houses Joanna has lived in or has wanted with the three loves of her life. These men are Henry, a guitar-playing truck driver; Lewis, her married lover, an artist who compartmentalized well enough to work on several paintings at once; and Gordon, the man she married. Most poignant, however, perhaps are the vignettes with Joanna's father and son. Widower Clarence seems to take his bitter wife's death as "the end of possibility"; Joanna's young son, Samuel, filters word and meaning with the same nimble clarity as his mother. With this novel, Schoemperlen triumphantly establishes her literary credentials. 25,000 first printing; $25,000 ad/promo; author tour.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 014025238X
• ISBN 13: 9780140252385
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48