Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us

Dept. of Speculation

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offillâ€™s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply â€œthe wife,â€ once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophesâ€”a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitionsâ€”the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.
Country USA
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 21427716
ReleaseDate 2014-01-28
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780385350815

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	21427716
ReleaseDate	2014-01-28
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780385350815

Dept. of Speculation

You might also like...