Carrying the Body

By Dawn Raffel

Book Overview

Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably.

A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416575103
• ISBN13: 9781416575108
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Reminiscent of Pedro Paramo

This novel reminded me of _Pedro Paramo_ (by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo), another slim novel that explores death and life through small but powerful observations and voices. _Pedro Paramo_'s style is a little more straightforward, but the form it takes is no less confusing or beautiful than in _Carrying the Body_. In both novels, you are asked to think about the language, to fill in the holes that these writers have excluded on purpose, and to examine the form of the novel itself.

Unimpeachable prose

Dawn Raffel's first novel is a sustained pleasure of everyday objects viewed gravely in percussive, unimpeachable prose. The voice is full of sinister intelligence and hurt. This is the novel the literate have been waiting for.

Christmas Present

This is a beautiful and original book. It would make a wonderful Christmas present for a discerning reader.

Christmas present

Here is something rare and beautiful, a wonderful Christmas present for discerning readers. A reader from New York

For real readers

What sentences! "A girl and still a girl, and not a girl at a window, nightdress loose." Raffel wants a real reader. Even if her style is tight--Dickinson comes to mind, especially with the dashes--it continues to spring open. "The train's report, all mineral and animal." She's caught the sound of illness, the panic of childrearing, the clipped exchange of argument, the muteness of love. I loved it because it can be read and read, with all the hestiations in the world.