Francesca Woodbridge is spying on her former life -- a recent lover, a wounded husband, and a rapidly changing America. "One morning I stood on the back deck of our handsome house and I realized that my interior self, the self I did not present to the world or even to those closest to me, seemed to have burned out." So confesses Francesca Woodbridge, the narrator of Deirdre McNamer s remarkable new novel. As her feelings recede "from the visceral to the archival," Francesca rekindles herself with plans for a garden, which lead to a lover -- her Russian gardener, an exile from Chernobyl. Now Francesca is supposedly in Greece with a tour group, but she is actually living in disguise just blocks from where her husband, Ren, and her teenage son await her return. Ren, a lawyer, is recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted some months earlier by a mysterious intruder. Francesca moves unnoticed through the town she calls home, seeing it with "the seizing eyes of a traveler," as Cynthia Ozick once put it. Her memories have a similar hyperclarity. She tells a series of stories that traverse the past four decades, beginning with her childhood in a wheatlands town overlooking missiles aimed at Russia. Her voice is searching, specific, unsparing, and sometimes darkly funny. In the process of listening, we learn who shot her husband, a modest mystery that rests on a larger one: for a woman like Francesca Woodbridge, at the end of this particular century, what is a fully lived life?
發表於2024-11-05
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My Russian 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載