Snake - Softcover

Kate Jennings

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841152854 ISBN 13: 9781841152851

Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

`Stunning - the work of a powerful imagination' Carol Shields. Snake is Kate Jennings first novel, she has written poetry and an award-winning collection of short stories. My life is about to begin. This is the only thought in Irene's head the day she marries a handsome second-world war veteran. But irritation, frustration and disappointment follow as the couple start their life together on a remote Australian farm. Rex, hard-working, reliable, agonised by love not returned and `imprisoned in loneliness', bears mostly silent inarticulate witness to Irene's flailing attempts to escape their claustrophobic existence. So do Girlie and Boy, their children, who to Rex seem like `the blurred faces on...a passing train. Faces that never gained definition no matter how hard they stared.' Stark yet strangely comic snapshots document the inexorable disintegration of the family. Kate Jennings' black humour and muscular prose, both pared down and rich in startling imagery, distils time and place in a work of literature that carves its exquisitely painful mark deep into the mind.

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: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841152854
• ISBN 13: 9781841152851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160