Saturday, March 01, 2008

The Wig My Father Wore

I picked up The Wig My Father Wore because I was so moved by Anne Enright's The Gathering about a month ago. The Wig surprised me because it's a kind of absurd novel - it's about a woman who's experiencing some emotional problems, and an angel moves in with her. A real angel. He does odd things like paint her entire house, inside the walls and out, and touches her body and removes her nipple and she's very attracted to him.

I wasn't really into the story, which is, as I said, literally absurd, but Enright's writing is so amazing, she could be writing about cleaning up dog shit and I'd be in. In fact, a description of her mother cutting an avocado brought me to my knees. Not only does she make me stop and read some pages over and over again, but I frequently had to put the book down and do a little literary analysis about whether she's more of a post modernist or a deconstructionist (Derrida was never my area). She creates a tempo that carries the whole book, and it rises like a crescendo at the end. I'm going to carry on and read everything she's ever written!

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