Florida - Hardcover

Schutt, Christine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810151502 ISBN 13: 9780810151505

Publisher: TriQuarterly, 2003

Synopsis

Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award

Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan's story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan's move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn't she?

Alice finds consolation in books and she herself is a storyteller who must build a home for herself word by right word. Florida is her story, recalled in brief scenes of spare beauty and strangeness as Alice moves from house to house, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, ever closer to the meaning of her experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and above all, the life-giving power of language.

About this title

Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Triquarterly Books, 2003, 0810151502

From the Back Cover:

"Beautiful and . . . elegantly wry, this story of an abandoned girl . . . is also the story of storytelling-and how it develops as a means to order one's disordered world."--The Believer

Set in the Midwest, where Florida represents a faraway paradise, this elegiac and luminous novel tells the story of Alice Fivey. Her father long gone and her mother--whose "toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida"--newly institutionalized, Alice is left in the care of relatives at age ten. While others try to mold her into someone different from her mother, she consoles herself with books and becomes a storyteller herself until, moving into adulthood, she finds the meaning of her own experience.
Told in brief scenes of spare beauty, Florida is a graceful and gripping tale of family, forgiveness, and creation of the self. In what John Ashbery called "an amazing achievement" and Mary Gordon dubbed "a wholly original endeavor," Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and the power of words.

"Schutt's subjects--love, family, death--are not new, but her lush, spilling style is fresh. This slender book grows plump on language."--Newsday

"The luxury of this debut novel is its rich, descriptive language. It's harnessed with powerful simplicity."--The Christian Science Monitor

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections Nightwork and A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. Her work, which has garnered an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, is published widely in literary journals. Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: TriQuarterly
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0810151502
• ISBN 13: 9780810151505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152