Life Before Death: A Novel - Softcover

Frucht, Abby

3.72

40 ratings by Goodreads

9780684846279: Life Before Death: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684846276 ISBN 13: 9780684846279

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

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The discovery of a lump in her breast and the subsequent fire in the museum where she works force a museum curator to reorder her life. Reprint.

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Review:

Isobel Albright is not the type of person to panic. "I was too sedentary. Around me, time and space made tracks but even they were only spiral, concentric, overlapping as the seasons." On the other hand, she's just found a lump (though it feels too sharp for that term) on her breast; her chief curator job has gone up in smoke--or at least the Fox Valley Historical Museum has; and she's sharing a bed with her best friend's son.

Mortal illness is not the sort of adventure Isobel has been craving, and yet Abby Frucht movingly turns her fate into an experience of wonder and grief. Life Before Death cuts between 1995 and 1996 and various points in the future, up to 2010. In the present, Isobel is dying; when time extends, she is in remission and her life is filled with friendship, children, a husband. "I missed him as fiercely as if I knew who he was." Frucht grounds her heroine's supple, searching imagination in a heart-stopping reality.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Frucht (Are You Mine?, 1993, etc.) imbues a dreary premise (woman discovers lump in breast, is diagnosed with cancer, dies) with remarkable originality and insight, leaving the reader pondering the nature of life and death. Two dramatic things happen to museum curator Isobel Albright during one week in her 40th year. First, she discovers a tiny lump in her breast. Then, a few days later, the small midwestern museum where she works burns down. As Isobel joins her fellow employees in trying to salvage the charred contents of the museum's collections, she also quietly undergoes a series of diagnostic tests that eventually reveal that her lump is malignant; even with an aggressive course of chemotherapy, she's told, she has only a ten- percent chance to live. Counseled by her best friend, Martha, who flies in from Seattle, and by Martha's dreamy, quasi-clairvoyant 19-year-old son, Hercules, who's been sleeping in Isobel's guest room for a while (and whom sensible, responsible, unmarried Isobel adores), Isobel opts to skip the chemo in favor of fully experiencing the few months that she has remaining. Approaching her death as methodically as she's approached her life, she continues her work at the museum while beginning to review her own past. But desperate longings rise to the surface nevertheless, and the bright, joyous life that Isobel might have had takes on far more vivid life in her imagination than the sweet, faded memories to which she bids farewell. The experience of dying--of giving up what was and grieving for what might have been--is extraordinarily well captured in Frucht's sometimes whimsical, often luminous prose. A unique and memorable work, marking a new level of artistry for the author. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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