My Sister’s Continent by Gina Frangello
#22 in my book challenge for this year was My Sister’s Continent by Gina Frangello, a recommendation from Blog of a Bookslut. I nearly stopped reading at page 23 because of writing issues, but a friend said it was worth it, so I continued and am glad I did.
I’ll cover the writing issues first, because most of them are technical issues. Perhaps they’re matters of taste, but they were pervasive enough to repeatedly interrupt my progress through the book. There were overwritten sentences, like “Her hair smelled cold like Christmas.” There were passages of unwieldy dialogue. The framing device for the novel is clumsy. It is supposed to be a re-writing of one twin’s psychological case study to include the perspectives of both twins. This leads to a thoroughly wacked point of view. It’s told in first person by one twin who includes her sister’s experiences in third person (both in near past and in flashback), but occasionally goes into second person to address her shrink, the author of the original case study. It begins and ends with diatribes against the shrink that felt unearned, because the shrink sessions were such a small part of the overall narrative.
In spite of my problems with writing and structure, I really liked the book. It is a contemporary re-telling of Freud’s Dora case, and is filled with complex, interesting characters. There’s dysfunction, illness, mystery and a lot of dark, messy sex. There’s some Atwood-ian ambiguity at the end, leaving the reader to decide what (and whom) to believe. Kirby, the narrator, goes through a believable and wrenching transformation. Her sister Kendra, the absent twin, seems to be self-destructing, though things are not as simple as they might appear. Frangello puts some intricate twists right through to the end. Though Kirby asserts that it is both their stories, ultimately Kendra is the one I cared most about.
May 24th, 2006 at 9:37 am
i cared less about Kirby as well. i think because she is so reactive.
May 24th, 2006 at 9:38 am
oh and p.s. I “get” the retelling of Freud thing, i see that it’s there, but it seemed pretty irrelevant to me. didn’t seem to define the story in anyway - feel like that could have been left off the blurb and wouldn’t have made a difference in my reading of it.
May 24th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
I think my two favorite characters, aside from Kendra, might have been Kirby’s fiance Aris and Kendra’s f-buddy Guitarist. Both of them were so completely wrecked by the women that they were simulataneously comic and pathetic.
I had to look up the Freud/Dora details later. The story adheres to it suprisingly tightly, but I think it might have gone a bit too far, because the best reason I can see for keeping that awkward framing of the re-written case study, and ending with the hatred of the shrink, is because of the Freud case, not because of Frangello’s story. If she’d trusted the power of her own narrative more, I think it could have been an even stronger book.
May 25th, 2006 at 6:35 am
i liked the guitarist. but i hated aris. i think the sadomasochistic michael was my favorite charater.