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Loading... Ravelingby Peter Moore Smith
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Truly unusual literary psychological suspense. Pilot Airie has been hospitalized for a psychotic episode that kept him catatonic in the woods for 3 days. As he begins to get better, he seems to remember that his neurosurgeon brother killed their sister many years before, though her disappearance is unsolved. Pilot seems to be omniscient, leading to an unusual combination of 1st and 3rd person perspectives. (  )vnovak | Nov 3, 2007 |   I read this book when it first was published in 2000, and was so riveted from the first page I missed my subway stop and came to somewhere in Queens. Rereading it, the same thing happened (only I wasn't on the subway) - it felt like getting drunk, or falling in love. Just - wow! The narration is amazing, but unusual. The first person narrator actually says he's omniscient, and he often describes events he can't possibly have witnessed, sometimes even assuming his brother's voice. It's hard to tell, also, how much to believe, given the narrator is hospitalized early on in the story, diagnosed as schizophrenic. It doesn't add to his credibility that, when he was nine years old and his younger sister disappeared without a trace, that he spent a certain amount of time not speaking, but crawling around on his hands and knees, a growling "wolfboy." This disturbed kid, now an adult, insists his brother killed his sister, even after the meds start to calm his delusional state and he stops hearing the light fixtures talking to him. His psychologist (who needs therapy badly herself) wonders about his claims and begins to piece together what really happened to the little girl whose disappearance years ago caused this family to unravel. Some of it's pretty brutal, much of it is wrenchingly sad, a lot of it is surprisingly funny, and all of it is brilliantly, beautifully written. One of the most original, most involving stories I've ever read. (  )bfister | May 4, 2007 | 0.016 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0316442178, Hardcover)"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Yeats's words seem fitting for the slowly disintegrating Airie family and their son Pilot, a schizophrenic. Twenty years ago, Pilot's little sister, Fiona, disappeared. In the aftermath, the Airie family fell apart--"unraveled," Pilot observes. Old sins have long shadows, and Pilot both welcomes and fears the darkness those shadows offer. His memories of Fiona's disappearance haunt him, but they are also an anchor to a past that seems more authentic than the present.Pilot's schizophrenia is all the more poignant contrasted with the poise of his older brother Eric, a prominent neurosurgeon. Eric is the one who comes to his mother's rescue when she is stranded on the highway, unable to see to drive home after Pilot's attempt to help her devolves into a terrifying, emotional paralysis: Did they know that things had become transparent again, clear as a blue sky seen through blue water? That I could actually see the cancer forming like a tulip bulb at the base of my mother's optical nerve? I could look through the trees all the way to the highway, through her car, and through her hair and skin and cartilage and bone into the folds of tissue around her eyes, to see the muscles dilating, the tendrils of nerves and vessels of blood, and the radical cells dividing there, and dividing again.Division also lies at the core of the relationship between Pilot and Eric. Drifting between past and present, the narrative reveals a long history of cruelty and abuse, which, after festering for years, erupts into what Eric's therapist dryly terms "a major psychotic episode." What could be crazier than accusing your brother of murdering your sister? Pilot's struggle to remember the truth of his family's history calls into question the very natures of truth, memory, individuality, and complicity. The novel's strength lies in the deftness with which author Peter Moore Smith captures Pilot's schizophrenia. The reader follows Pilot in each unsteady attempt to negotiate the ever-fluctuating boundary between reality and illusion: "Eyes closed, I was in a bed upstairs, my arms under the covers so they wouldn't float away. Outside the window a single branch was reaching toward the room, unfurling itself to tap against the glass, warning me." Raveling weaves the fragile threads that bind families and selves into a tapestry that both cloaks its characters and leaves them starkly vulnerable. --Kelly Flynn (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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