Annunciation CL

by David Plante

A search throughout Europe for an unknown Renaissance painting of the Annunciation provides the focus for the intertwining destinies of Claire, an artist; her daughter Rachel, who has been raped; and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395680913
• ISBN13: 9780395680919
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A TESTAMENT OF FRIENDSHIP AND HOPE

Novelist David Plante once again probes life on earth and our reasons for living. How does one find meaning and joy in the midst of an existence shrouded with disappointment and despair? Or, as one of his characters, Claude, muses, "Why was he so attracted to what he didn't know, and why did what he didn't know so fill him with grief?" On her way home from school in London, Rachel, Claire's 16-year-old daughter is raped. She finds herself pregnant and decides to keep the child. Claire, an art student, is conscience stricken because she had left Rachel at home alone that weekend, and she determines to devote herself to nurturing Rachel. Claude, an editor of art books, has recently been transferred to London where he meets the two women. In doing her research, Claire finds a reference to an unknown painting of the Annunciation by a Renaissance artist, she and Rachel follow the trail to Italy and then to Russia, where they again find Claude. The story of their quest as written by Plante is rendered in highly polished prose, burnished to a sheen by the author's matchless insights. Annunciation is a testament of friendship, strength and hope. - Gail Cooke

Plante's disconcerting spiritual quest.

Annunciation: A Novel by David Plante Review by A. L. Wilson Quietly stunning. Plante is at his deepest when writing of the experience of grief. In Annunciation, grief -- and its existential twin, anxiety -- are so free-floating and enveloping as to be palpable in the texture of the prose. Some critics have thought that in this, his most recent effort, Plante neglects those deft strokes by which great novelists make characters come to life and breathe on the page. But to my mind such critics take a too limited view of the possibilities for extending the reach of literary art. It is not all about creating "convincing characters" to distract readers from their private concerns. There are many ways for a novel to lift us out of ourselves, but somehow the best novels also find ways to put us back into ourselves, into our lives, with renewed and clarified sense of being. Plante's novels, which almost always portray characters or narrators confronting life in the mode of existential crisis, have always tended to empty out pscyhological or subjective "depth" in order to focus our attention, finally, upon the eventfulness of the day to day. It is really in Plante's descriptions -- of a wine bottle label, of a clump of shovelled snow falling from a roof to the street, of a moment in which two characters eyes, gazing through the glass of a framed picture, suddenly meet in the reflection -- that we experience the greatness and the purity of his vision. In Annunciation, however, he takes an unusual step for a modern writer, in that he very explicitly and deliberately frames his narrative in religious terms. The characters of Annuciation -- the sensual yet bewildered Claire, who is both drawn toward and repulsed by the "darkness" of her art thesis subject, Pietro Testa (a suicide, like her husband); her daughter, the calmly opaque schoolgirl Rachel, who declares her intention to bring to term a child fathered by a rapist; and the anxiety-ridden, despairing Claude, who finds a kind of redemption in committing himself both to the search for a lost painting and, finally, to Rachel and her child -- become, in Plante's hands, vehicles for exploring the meaning and limits of "faith" in our time. The character triad Grief-Acceptance-Anxiety is completed by one of Plante's most exhilarating creations -- Joy, in the person of Maurice, an old emigre who, acting as Claude's guide on the trip to find the lost picture, manages to infuse fervor into their lives and to make the trip a real spiritual quest. Plante has taught in Moscow, and the many precise details of chaotic life in that city in the immediate aftermath of Communism are among the greatest gifts the novel has to offer its readers. It is a disconcerting, rarified, somewhat heartbreaking journey which concludes, perhaps too vaguely for some readers, not in any pat "vision of grace" but the image of a glass of water shining in a dark room, and in Claude's thought that the "darkness" around such a