Attachment - Hardcover

Fonseca, Isabel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307266915 ISBN 13: 9780307266910

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

The author of the classic Bury Me Standing now gives us a riveting first novel that reaches from the Indian Ocean to London and New York, and into the most confounding precincts of the human heart.

Jean Hubbard is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over—but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious e-mail correspondence that propels her on to alarming, and illuminating, adventures of her own in her adopted home of London and her native New York.

Assured, funny, tender, and provocative, Attachment is unflinching in its depiction of desire, of the responsibility that comes with age and family, and of the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.

About this title

About the Author

Born in New York and educated at Columbia and Oxford, Isabel Fonseca worked at The Times Literary Supplement, and her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, from The Wall Street Journal and The Nation to The American Scholar, The Economist, and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters. Her first book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, was an international best seller.

Reviews

In a compelling fiction debut, Fonseca takes syndicated health columnist Jean Hubbard, an Oxford-trained lawyer, through a dramatic demonstration of the limits of attachment. Jean is filing her columns from the remote Indian Ocean island of St. Jacques, where her advertising-genius husband, Mark, has moved them. Their time there is disrupted when Jean intercepts a salacious letter from Mark's London office, which leads her in turn to an e-mail signed by a lubricious Giovana (Jean immediately notices the odd single n). The e-mail features explicit attachments, and without reflecting on the consequences, Jean, writing as Mark, begins an e-mail correspondence with Giovana. Ensuing events occur in a beautifully orchestrated dramatic arc, drawing in Mark's unscrupulous business partner; Jean's stricken father in New York; Mark's first love's daughter; Jean's former beau; and the secret that pushes the 23-year marriage further toward the precipice. Fonseca's nonfiction Bury Me Standing drew a vivid portrait of the international Gypsy community, and she shifts locales and emotional registers with evocative ease here, delving deeply into her ensemble's motivations. She's as unsparing of their flaws as she is frank about their desires. (May)
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A cultured British couple who pride themselves on unconventionality decamp to an island in the Indian Ocean, intending to continue their careers (his, advertising; hers, a women’s-health column) via the Internet. Then the wife opens a smutty letter to her husband, apparently from a lover. Rather than endure this affair, after twenty-three years of marriage, she goes online masquerading as her husband, and initiates an X-rated e-mail relationship with her rival. The plot strains credulity, but Fonseca’s vivisection of matrimony and desire is cruelly exacting. She likens pornography to a bullfight, at first "mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace," yet ultimately disappointing. "How in the world," she wonders, "could it be boring and arousing at the same time?"
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Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307266915
• ISBN 13: 9780307266910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320