Snake - Hardcover

Jennings, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880015381 ISBN 13: 9780880015387

Publisher: Ecco Pr, 1997

Synopsis

An award-winning Australian writer makes her American debut with a story set in Australia in the fifties and sixties about a devoted, virtuous husband and his proto-feminist wife, a woman seething with anger and desire.

About this title

Review:

Snake is the story of a marriage. A bad marriage, to be exact. The ring is hardly on Irene's finger before she begins to realize she's made a terrible mistake. Over the course of this very slim novel by Australian writer Kate Jennings, Irene's realization hardens into grim conviction. Nevertheless, she and her husband, Rex, remain together, scratching out a living and a life on a remote farm somewhere in postwar Australia. Eventually they have children, Girlie and Boy; Irene gets a job in town writing cheerful farm stories for a local paper; Rex farms and the years go by while this mismatched pair grow farther and farther apart.

There is something almost biblical about Jenning's tale--in the desolate landscape where Rex and Irene's farm is beset by locusts, snakes and other pests, in the Jobian trials they endure and in the inevitability of terrible retribution for the sin of living loveless lives. Yet the book's spare, almost flat narration saves Snake from becoming inflated by the importance of its own themes.

About the Author:

Kate Jennings, who grew up in Australia, has lived since 1979 in New York. Her writings have appeared in New York Times Book Review . Snake is her first novel and the first of her books to be published in the United Kingdom.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0880015381
• ISBN 13: 9780880015387
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 157