Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #303238 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-21
• Released on: 2007-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781555974763
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
In this latest tense salvo from the author of Wounded and Erasure, Ishmael Kidder-divorced, self-loathing, and distrustful of government and restaurants-lives on a mountain outside of Taos, New Mexico, writing romance novels under the name Estelle Gilliam. When his 11-year-old daughter Lane is brutally murdered, Ishmael's already fragile world implodes, and revenge becomes his only salve. Having kidnapped and tortured the man he believes to be Lane's killer, he writes a confession and manifesto, which Everett delivers as this novel. Composed in text fragments and illustrations, Ishmael's ponderous rant covers everything from semiotics and Greek philosophy to deception and the Iraq War. Scenes of torture and grief are affecting but surprisingly few, and scant time is devoted to the captor-captive relationship, or any relationship, other than Ishmael's with words. Many of his fragments are nearly indecipherable, as he inverts sentences and misspells words to contend with the failures of language and meaning, and by extension sanity, morality and law. While Everett's aims are imaginatively and intellectually rigorous, the novel's tangle of emotion and strained logic ultimately frustrate the reader more than illuminate Ishmael's plight. The best scenes, however, relate wry but beautiful moments of civic and domestic tenderness in language that is musical and sure.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jim Krusoe

The narrator of The Water Cure is a man whose 11-year-old daughter has been raped and killed. He now is in the process of torturing her murderer, but this, as they say, is only the tip of the iceberg. True, as a subject it's plenty disturbing in itself, but through a variety of devices -- including drawings, mini-lectures on language, philosophy, politics, theology and nature, and even excerpts from a romance novel called "The Gentle Storm" -- Percival Everett has made his new novel much more than a simple horror show or self-righteous rant.

So while The Water Cure is most decidedly a novel, it is also a meditation on what it means to be a victim and a torturer at the same time. In his finest book to date, Everett combines in his narrator, Ishmael Kidder, a man pursued by furies (some of his own making -- he had left his wife before his daughter was killed) and one who speaks with a cool sense of detachment.

If this question of who has the right to torture seems familiar to Americans, it's not an accident. One of my favorite moments comes early on as Kidder declares, "I come from a nation of stupid [expletive] and by association, at least, if not genetic inevitability, a sobering and sickening thought, I must be a stupid [expletive] as well. The stupid [expletives] in my country elected a king stupid [expletive], and he ruled with stupid [expletive] glory and majesty, a stupid [expletive] for the ages, who in a more fair time might have been successful as the man who follows behind the circus parade with a shovel, but probably not. The stupid [expletive] was elected by stupid [expletive] and supported by stupid [expletive] and even occasionally fell out of favor with stupid [expletive], but stupid [expletive], being stupid [expletive], either forgot or forgave and again loved the king stupid [expletive]." Reading this made me happy for just exactly as long as it took me to realize that this nation of "stupid [expletive]" included me. Gulp.

Not surprisingly, the book is a series of fragments, as befits a mind in agony. Do the parts add up to a whole? Almost, and this is one of Everett's points. In one part Kidder sets up 18 mirrors around the molester so the man can better witness his own torture. Would 18 more make his picture twice as complete? Would one have been plenty? So these fragments of writing are like pieces of the mirror through which Kidder reveals his own agony -- frustrating, incomplete, inexact. Throughout the book, a drawing sequence -- the famous Gestalt cat -- emerges whisker by whisker, so that at the end there it is, almost complete, lacking only eyes.

So how are we to make sense of ourselves? Everett is too wise and too sad to provide any answers, except to remind us that language won't save us -- a brave statement for a writer. Steadfastly, stubbornly, he refuses to let the reader escape into a narrative fantasy; the pages that actually describe the events surrounding the girl's murder are surprisingly few, but they spread throughout the rest like a cancer, making the detachment more horrible.

Can a novel be separated from life? How does a writer, or anyone else for that matter, separate himself or herself from "the music of my torture, learned well from my world, my culture, my government"? Kidder is on fire, but if the cure for being on fire is water, what does it mean to drown?

In other words, this is a book that not only makes you feel, but think. And what it made me think about was what poor stuff we humans are: venial, mendacious, hopeless and, yes, in pain, too. But also that the great mission accomplished by this particular president and his administration is to have made it impossible for humans, specifically Americans, to pretend yet again to be innocent. And if this realization leaves us with any glory at all, it's not the knowledge that the world can be made right again. Instead, it is the courage to contemplate the stream of misery we have left in our wake, and our own responsibility in the matter. It's no accident that the last word of The Water Cure is "retriever."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Veteran author Everett (Wounded, 2005) melds the techniques of metafiction with a portrait of a grieving father out for revenge. When Ishmael Kidder discovers that his 11-year-old daughter, Lane, has been viciously murdered after being sexually abused, he experiences both guilt and rage. He divorced his wife and thinks that the instability he left in his wake somehow contributed to the victimization of his daughter. Although a suspect has been found, there is not enough evidence to charge him with the murder; that's when Ishmael determines to kidnap and torture the man in gruesome fashion over several days. He also appears to have a bitterly philosophical conversation with Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, speak in a Joyce-like invented language, and moderate a debate between Plato and Socrates. Pretty soon, readers will be unclear about a number of things, including whether the kidnapping and torture are real or part of a revenge fantasy. Fans of metafiction will find this a provocative exercise, but many more readers prefer their thrillers straight up, no chaser. Wilkinson, Joanne

Customer Reviews

brutally brilliant, brilliantly brutal
Having read several other Percival Everett-brand products, I now think of two different "Percival Everett" author functions. One is willing to write fairly conventional novels ("realism," as those who would put air/scare quotes around the word would say), and another finds such forms inadequate systems for conveyance of reality. For me, it was the latter author-function guise--an authorial presence who is grimly playful, willfully indirect, frustratedly eloquent--who wrote this book. The author function that produced "The Water Cure" tries to produce "art," while the other one is willing to write (in some other Everett-brand novels) what usually passes for art among those dwindling few who still read books.

The narrator here is a hack novelist who faces up to his own hackiness amidst the crazed despair brought about by the death of innocence, as figured in his young daughter, and by his own thirst for revenge. The grim, willful, and frustrated author function put into this hack novelist's mouth the following description of art: "I don't believe that art is supposed to stand there like an open door or gate. It's supposed to be a wall that has to be scaled or a minefield that has to be negotiated."

You're likely to find the adventure of reading this novel rewarding if you bring along some awareness of Saussurean Semiotics, Barthesian authorial inspections, and Platonic epistemological queries, as well as some curiosity about what the "it" actually is when we say "It's raining outside." But even if you don't bring all of that, the struggle through this broken narrative could still be very rewarding, and the many references to archaic philosophical notions are much more than mere erudition. You should also be willing to endure a narrator who wonders openly and repeatedly what it means to write and read novels in a country that appears to be heading, thanks to those in control of our steering wheel, straight off a cliff. We Americans are finding our torturing-and-killing side harder to ignore. Perhaps soon, more of us will be able to understand how the devastating death of an innocent girl in this novel could be fairly said to represent the most recent rape and murder of American innocence.

The Everett-brand author function here exposes both "fiction" and our current fictional reality as fantasies, but he also conveys a very convincing, palpable sense of something real. That real, living, breathing thing is an artistic consciousness, struggling to find an excuse for art in such dismayingly brutal times.

refreshing read
so many books use the same guidelines to writing. This book gives you a refreshing, but dark and funny read with a twist. Very interesting.

Rambling
Despite this novel's intriguing premise, I found little more than a stream of consciousness with no discernible plot.