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Martha Schabas

Autor/a de Various Positions

2 obres 138 Membres 13 Ressenyes

Obres de Martha Schabas

Various Positions (2011) 128 exemplars
My Face in the Light (2022) 10 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Gènere
female

Membres

Ressenyes

This book just wasn’t for me. I appreciate characters capable of self-reflection, but reading a novel about a character’s obsessive introspections is tedious.

Justine, nearing her 30th birthday, is a fairly successful actress living in Toronto with her husband Elias. While in England she sabotages an audition and decides that she is going to give up acting. When a man on a train offers her a business opportunity that would allow her to stay in London, she eventually decides to abandon her life in Toronto though she doesn’t really know what she is looking for. Living in London, she spends time reflecting on growing up with her artist mother and her marriage to Elias while meeting people who are also searching for their place in the world.

Justine is experiencing an identity crisis. She wonders whether she has ever lived authentically. She sees herself as “an outsider dropped into a system that had been desired and put together by someone else. That if I scratched the surface of my life, my nail would pierce a flimsy laminate and poke out the other end.” She thinks, “It seemed equally implausible that I’d ever move through my life with the conviction that I was moving the right way and that my whole self was moving with me, that I wasn’t, unwittingly, leaving crucial bits behind.” Like a character in a novel, “’She keeps thinking she’s just one move away from living in the right place.’” She believes she has been acting, not living: “I’d let acting wriggle its way into my life so insidiously and so completely that parts of my life and parts of my acting had become indistinguishable from each other.” In essence, she feels like a “pitiable fraud.”

She definitely feels that her life has been designed by others: “my whole existence was distracted, that nothing seemed of my own design.” Certainly, it is her mother that steered her into an acting career. Justine even hates that Elias gave her boots he chose for her rather than gifting her ones she had loved. She is so focused on wanting to make decisions for herself that she resents a cosmetics saleswoman using the pronoun we and wants to do something to “force this woman to be herself”! That woman makes a suggestion about a lipstick colour, but though it is flattering, Justine is “unable to let her win” and refuses to buy it. Though we’ve all probably wanted to escape our lives at some point, Justine’s behaviour often comes across as petty and petulant.

Rachel, Justine’s mother, is an artist who has certainly scarred her daughter. To say that she is non-maternal would be an understatement. She is self-centred, impulsive, sexual, needy, and manipulative. Her treatment of her daughter and others in her life is difficult to excuse. Justine’s description of her mother as a “sick woman” is spot-on.

Justine admits that “it seemed to take me more time to process the world and figure out how I felt about it” so the sojourn to London is an attempt to give herself that time, “cracking old habits, clearing out my closet and figuring out what to keep and what to discard.” It does, however, take her an inordinate amount of time to realize that some relationships may seem “all-consuming for a time but [are] ultimately doomed to fail”: something may seem “tragic and insurmountable in the short term” but sometimes “There is nothing to be done” except move on. I kept wanting her to just get over herself and accept that “her suffering was not hers alone but one of many variations on a universal theme.” Justine’s actions at the end suggest that she has decided what is important and what to leave behind.

Normally, I enjoy reading interpretive literature that focuses on journeys of self-discovery, but this one just didn’t appeal. Perhaps the almost-total lack of action, the near-constant self-analysis, and the glacial pace are to blame. Perhaps it’s my stage in life which makes me impatient with such intense self-focus. Justine does indeed need “something acerbic and fresh that would knock [her] out of [her] head.” It is not a bad book, but it had limited appeal to me.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley. Quotations may not be exactly as they appear in the final copy.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
… (més)
 
Marcat
Schatje | Apr 12, 2022 |
Fantastically well written, darkly disturbing, and very adult. Whoever shelved this book as YA must have been the same guy who wrote the synopsis inside the dust jacket. He obviously read a different book.

Like my fellow Goodreads reviewers pointed out, the synopsis is very misleading. This isn't really a ballet book and it definitely isn't a YA book. Georgia is only 14, but she is already a deeply disturbed individual. This might be connected to her home life. She is sex-crazed and it is subtly implied that society made her that way.

This book is beautifully structured and written. The author must have some kind of background in psychology. I can see why this book offended the other reviewers on Goodreads, but the author isn't saying that all 14-year-olds are sex maniacs. Instead, she's painting a gorgeous portrait of ONE individual that we, as a society, created.

Very interesting. Read it with an open mind. If you get a chance, go to your local bookstore and move all the copies of "Various Positions" from the YA section to Fiction.

Also, isn't the cover gorgeous?
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Marcat
bookishblond | Hi ha 11 ressenyes més | Oct 24, 2018 |
Being a dancer, I could appreciate much of what the main character went through during the course of this book. Dancers tend to have a different perspective on life, and this book portrayed that. It reminded me of the movie "Black Swan."
However, this book was awkward to get through. The way it was written made it seem as though it were meant for a younger audience, although the contents show that that is clearly not the case.
I liked this book, but I will not be reading it again.
 
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Shelby_Kuzma | Hi ha 11 ressenyes més | May 25, 2013 |
Writer Lynn Coady sort of sums this novel up perfectly, with her back cover blurb: "The ever-shifting fault lines between the sex lives and sexual objectification of teenaged girls are traversed with all the artful nuance and precision of the ballet itself...a gripping and unflinching novel."

This is Shabas' first novel and it is mostly tight. The first few chapters were overly detail-laden - every bit of minutiae, "I folded the paper back into the envelope" sort of stuff, is noted. This took away momentum very early on but by about page 60...it was worked out and the action and details being written about help propel the story forward.

This novel is fairly dark and twisty. I spent a lot of time in this world so can identify completely and while I felt a lot of the story was well handled, at moments, it felt like a characterization in a spooferific and clichéd way. Hence, the dreaded 3-star rating.

Shabas definitely has talent and I look forward to her next book. She is a bold writer.
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JooniperD | Hi ha 11 ressenyes més | Apr 5, 2013 |

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Premis

Estadístiques

Obres
2
Membres
138
Popularitat
#148,171
Valoració
3.1
Ressenyes
13
ISBN
11

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