Yellow

By Janni Visman

Book Overview

In her spotless top-floor flat, Stella has created the ultimate cocoon. Her life is impeccably ordered, spare, and completely sealed within her London flat. Everything comes to her?her aromatherapy massage clients, her pharmaceuticals, and her lovers. When Ivan, the gasman, comes to fix a leak in her flat, she asks him to stay to for good. Soon, a Vertigo-like spiral of secrets and betrayals begin to seep through the flat like the acrid, yellow odor of gas. And as the two engage in a brilliantly choreographed erotic dance, Stella?s life gradually slips through her fingers as everything she has sought to control turns against her.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670034029
• ISBN13: 9780670034024
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

wonderful psychological thriller

Though having a decent client list of rich despondent middle-aged women, aromatherapist Stella never leaves her home as she is agoraphobic. She has established a routine out of her house so that she can live comfortably albeit restrained as she knows one step outside has her panicking. Since she has made herself a virtual prisoner with her being her own warden, she also now fears gas leaks, her latest phobia. She hires someone to remove anything that uses it and replaces it with safe electricity. While the repairman Ivan completes the job, Stella seduces the hunk. He moves in with the phobic woman that night though she establishes the rules of their arrangement. Stella finds her lifestyle immensely improved as he provides her easier access to the outsiders. However, when he returns to her home one day wearing a gold-plated ID bracelet given to him from his former girlfriend, Stella gets a bit further unhinged. She begins to seek other evidence that Ivan is stepping out on her and finds plenty of evidence in his belongings. She persuades Skye to trail Ivan when he leaves the house even as her routines unravel because she tries to emulate the photo she found amongst his possessions. YELLOW is a wonderful psychological thriller that takes place over five days in the same locale as the heroine's perfect routines that never deviates (think six sigma but to an infinite level) begin to unravel leading to doubts, accidents, and much more. The key to this finely plotted tale is whether Stella has lost her groove and her grip on reality or is Ivan perhaps abetted by Skye is driving her insane. Fans will read Janni Visman's powerful character driven novel in one stark sitting. Harriet Klausner

"Yellow is the color of jealousy."

What feels at first like a novel of suspicion, mistrust and the subtle erosion of jealousy morphs into a tale filled with menace, the subversive threat of the unknown. Stella Lewis is organized, every aspect of her precisely detailed life suggesting a need for control of her environment; that this control provides security is, of course, false, but a prescription she clings to as rigidly as the aromatherapy oils lined in the cabinet of her London treatment room, the labels exactly aligned in rows like regimented soldiers. Perhaps it is this tendency to containment and cleanliness that attracts Ivan to Stella. In her apartment to replace all her gas fixtures with electric, Ivan appreciates the delicate balance of structure and harmony, Stella's calm manipulation of her daily routine as her massage patients come and go. The couple meshes comfortably together, the rules dictated by Stella before Ivan moves in: "No stories from the past. No unnecessary anecdotes. No questions." When Ivan's past intrudes, bit by bit, the questions begin, thoughts plaguing Stella that she cannot put aside, intrusions into her carefully restricted world that upset the balance of daily life, at the same time sending an erotic charge through the relationship, unexpected layers of passion, and with it, suspicion. In a deft melding of Stella's inner turbulence and outer calm and the increasing menace that creeps into the story, the harmonious shifts day by day to chaos, with the aid of an overly-friendly, lonely neighbor, a faithless cat, a too-sympathetic sister, a long-lost love and the gradual erosion of a well-planned life. Taut psychological tension is brilliantly layered into Stella's confused, haunted thoughts and Ivan's increasingly suspicious behavior, events moving toward a startling resolution that will prove Stella's safe constructions a sham. Yellow is a novel that begs to be read in one sitting, impossible to put aside. Scents, sounds, colors, imagination, touch. The author creates a fascinating palette of aberrant human behavior, shifting like an Impressionist painting until the image is suddenly clear. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

absolutely fantastic

I randomly found this book in the local library and could not put it down - I found myself reading it as if I was the main character. I passed it along to a few of my friends since and they all agreed it was delightful! Please try this book out....love, deception, paranoia, panic, obsessive behavior, I could go on forever! It's all in here...and the ending will make you wish you could be so brave (I know it made me feel that way for days...I couldn't get it out of my head!) TWO THUMBS UP!! I CANT WAIT FOR MORE FROM VISMAN!

Worth reading!!

This book is different from books I usually read but I had no problem getting completely engrossed. It tells a story about a very strange relationship in very strange circumstance. I loved the psychological background and the attempt to analyze the main character's personality and behaviour. It is definatley worth reaching for at the book stores.

Certainly worth a look.............

Yellow is an intimate novel which, as good fiction should do (and in this way Janni Visman continues the work started in her first novel, Sex Education), creates a perfectly formed world for us to observe, experience, enjoy and perhaps even learn from. This world is revealed via a first person narrative told from the perspective of Stella - damaged, obsessive, particular, acutely perceptive - who has created a precisely organised existence that has shrunk down to the confines of her second floor flat/treatment room in a London suburb. The well choreographed story takes us through five days which dramatically change the ordered state of Stella's life and her relationship with her lover Ivan, her sister Skye and her cat, George. Not as dysfunctional as that described in Iain Banks' scary `Wasp Factory', or as ultimately melodramatic as Mark Haddon's `Curious incident of the dog in the Night-time', Yellow completely succeeds in putting the reader inside the mind of a disturbed yet - within their own rules - rational being; which may well make you think twice about some of your own traits, but will certainly remind you - if you need reminding - of some of the complexity and curiousness of others.