The Perfect Place: A Novel - Softcover

Kohler, Sheila

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590512049 ISBN 13: 9781590512043

Publisher: Other Press, 2005

Synopsis

"A wholly entrancing narrative....Kohler has a fine ear for truth and untruth and the musical possibilities of their interplay."—J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace

At a hotel in Switzerland, a mysterious and elegant woman is recovering from an unspecified illness. One day, a man approaches her on the terrace. "You were a friend of Daisy Summers," he says. With that simple statement begins the unraveling of a decades-old mystery and a journey into a mind as fascinatingly intelligent and amoral as readers have seen since Patricia Highsmith unleashed The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Other Press is proud to reissue Sheila Kohler's stunning debut novel. In the fifteen years since first publication of The Perfect Place, Kohler has staked her own terrain in a series of unique and seductive novels and short stories that have been internationally acclaimed.

About this title

About the Author

Sheila Kohler has published five novels, including Crossways (Other Press, 2005), and three collections of short stories. Her novel Cracks was chosen by New York Newsday and Library Journal as one of the best books of 1999. A native of South Africa, she makes her home in New York City and teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.

From Publishers Weekly

In this relentlessly literary first novel, writing techniques dominate content. Prose in the once avant-garde style of Robbe-Grillet and Duras (theirs stemming from passion, Kohler's a passionless intellectual exercise) evokes the terminal ennui of its narrator, a nameless woman of a certain age tracking down a repressed memory. Supposedly damaged by her upbringing among idle, isolated, rich colonials, and by intimate encounters with females (the first, her mother), she reveals homophobic fantasies rather than psychological truths; her attitude toward sex can be compared to Henry James at his most Victorian. Indeed, one of the few named characters (besides a black servant portentously called Justice) is Daisy Summers, a Daisy Miller mutation. When the narrator finally recalls her trauma, the event and the process of its recovery matter neither to her nor to the reader. Kohler's point is that Donne was wrong, one woman can be an island. And she does prove that, like the sea around us, one slim book seems endless.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1590512049
• ISBN 13: 9781590512043
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160