Cleave: A novel

By Nikki Gemmell

Book Overview

Snip Freeman is a woman in search of her father. Not the physical presence of him - she knows where he lives, in the desert out of Alice Springs - but the truth behind his abandonment of her and her mother. At the bequest of her grandmother, Snip sets out for the Centre to track him down. She is no stranger to this part of the country; she goes there regularly, drawn by the strange power of the land and by the strength of community of its native people, who provide her with a greater sense of family than her own ever has. Snip, thirty-something, has always been a loner and a wanderer. Afraid of intimacy, and preferring to direct all her energies to her painting, she moves on as soon as she feels herself growing attached to anyone. When she somehow lets herself fall in love with Dave, the guy who answers her ad for a co-driver to the Centre, she runs away from him too. With her father, Bud, Snip escapes into the desert, both of them fleeing imaginary demons. Their four-wheel-drive hits a rock and the fuel tank is punctured, and they're stranded for days on end without adequate food or water. Then Bud disappears altogether. Dave, too, is running - after Snip. The lesson she has to learn is that she cannot run away from herself. Nor, she discovers, does she want to repeat her father's mistake and live only for herself. Cleave revolves around the themes of covering and discovering, revenge, the nature of affinity, and finding you place in the world. Like Shiver it is written with a high-voltage energy and is particularly strong on male/female relationships in the complex nineties. While not a sequel to Shiver, Cleave is the second in a trilogy of novels set in extreme locations, and its evocation of the desert, the use of the desert as a metaphor for human isolation, will resonate with readers everywhere. Like Shiver, Cleave is a moving and very personal novel, and is bound to win her many more admirers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0091837324
• ISBN13: 9780091837327
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 377 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.9" x 1.1" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Solemnity

At the end of my edition there were a number of questions for discussion that asked English major-type questions. The questions made me laugh because the book was so real on its own, and the questions made it all seem so articifial. And that is the real issue of the book, I think. What is real and what is artificial. Snip worries about whether what she feels for Dave is real love or infatuation. She spends the entire book discovering the reality behind her family, particularly her father. She feels like she really belongs in the community, but she doesn't feel like she can paint there. This is a good book mostly for the unique phrasings. I like the way Gemmell uses language throughout. She knows how to choose a word. Don't be fooled, though. This book is rough. Its themes and language are not for the tenderhearted. I have to say, though, that I think it is rough in a good way.

Gemmell writes brilliantly

THE desolate landscapes of central Australia, eerily beautiful and cruel, are superbly evoked in Cleave. Nikki Gemmell's heroine, Snip Freeman, is a painter who, as a child, lived in the centre until her father Bud deserted her. Snip has occasionally lived with the Aborigines, but refuses to settle, flaunting her tough self-sufficiency. Prompted by her grandmother, she heads west from Sydney with a stranger, Dave, in search of Bud, her own childhood and, perhaps, a new life. Gemmell writes brilliantly about the journey, about Snip's insistence that she feels lust, not love, for Dave, and later, about Snip and her father marooned in the desert, both hallucinating as they run out of water and hope.

I couldn't put it down

This is a passionate, driven novel whose main character, the flinty but vulnerable Snip Freeman, has stayed with me long after I finished the book. Gemmell's voice is vivid and poetic, unlike any other I have read. I couldn't put the novel down. It was facinating to read about a place so foreign as the Australian desert, and the central sequence where the protagonists are stranded and running out of time is wonderfully handled. I can imagine this book having a huge fan base, particularly among the sort of readers who loved "The Beach." Powerful stuff.

hauntingly evocative of the Australian red centre

Haunting hard prose evoking a battle for existence in a place where there is no easy way out, Alice Springs is a peach of a novel. Can't wait for Ms Gemmell's next book.

A gret novel in a literary vein

Phillipa "Snip" Freeman never stays in one place for very long. Relationships are short term and must totally be on Snip's terms. The only things accompanying Snip on her wanderlust throughout Australia is a sleeping bag and her one compassion, her art.Everything suddenly changes when Snip's grandmother dies, leaving a weird inheritance for the endless traveler. Snip received an envelope containing a $30,000 check and a note: "Hunt him down". Snip heeds her grandmother's advice and begins a search in the Outback for her estranged father. On the trip inland, she meets a geologist who accompanies her. The pair begins to fall in love, but Snip uses a minor incident to leave him behind. When she finally finds her father, she asks him what destroyed their family?ALICE SPRINGS is an intriguing introspective search for one's identity. Snip is one of the best characters of the year as her independence and vulnerability constantly battle for supremacy. However, the two male leads seem to only exist as extensions of Snip rather than fully developed characters. The Australian landscape beautifully adds to the harshness of the quest. Nikki Gemmell provides readers with a profound tale of finding one's inner essence. The soul searching adventure will garner much attention from fans who enjoy a story line that centers on the conflicting psyche that make up a human being.Harriet Klausner