Eve in the City

By Thomas Rayfiel

Book Overview

"They say the city never sleeps. It does. Just before dawn you can hear it snore. Light hangs in the air, directionless, not yet pressed into rays. The smell of a hidden sea soaks through stone. The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345455169
• ISBN13: 9780345455161
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Great first four sentences

I may be the wrong reader for Rayfiel, although since I've just finished the third of his three novels I can't be too wrong. Others have criticized him for choosing to write in the first person about the sex life of a much younger female, so I won't join that chorus. If we made a rule that writers had to be the same age and sex as their protagonists then literature would be much impoverished. My problem is that I lose interest when characters drift off into dreamland and I'm not sure whether they're remembering things or imagining them. Rayfield did a lot of that in Split Levels. In Colony Girl he kept things anchored in his fictional real world but he's back at it again here. Eve, from Colony Girl has arrived in Manhattan, at the age of 16 and obtained her own apartment. How she did that would have been an interesting story, since she's naïve and friendless and poor. Her only social contacts are in the bar where she's working off the books, for Victor, the illegal Mingrelian, who wants to marry her. She witnesses a rape and knife attack and goes to tell the police about it, but then isn't sure if she was imagining it or is telling lies about it. Some implausible melodramatic developments arise from this two hundred pages later but there's puzzlement rather than suspense build-up. Characters tend to be enigmatic and act in strange ways anyway. Victor is the most interesting character and the most likely New Yorker, with realistic money and housing dilemmas. I hope he's the center of the next Rayfiel. Why should we bother to read the next Rayfiel? Just read the first four sentences of this one and you'll know why.

Colony Girl Grows Up

I loved COLONY GIRL and have been eagerly awaiting this sequel. While Eve grew up in a unique setting, a religious colony, she is now in a common situation: a young woman trying to find herself in Manhattan. But Rayfiel has vividly shown that the external situation is only tangential to the real setting, what goes on in Eve's mind. Fortunately, that place is sharp, funny and always surprising. The novel is about gaps: between what is real and what you experience; between what others feel and how you perceive them; between expectations and reality. Throughout the compelling story, we root for Eve to discover that it's her own experiences and feelings that count. In a very satisfying conclusion, we see that she has, and are left wanting to see where that discovery will take her next.