Dept. of Speculation (2014)

by Jenny Offill

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Unusual moving deeply effective (

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Overgaard | Jul 14, 2017 |

Tight and taut. A book to admire for its craftsmanship, but I was emotionally unmoved. (

)

dcmr | Jul 4, 2017 |

This book left a pit in my stomach. I found Offill's style interesting, but the subject matter was as depressing as the city she lived in. While the pain was keen and well done, what captured my attention the most was how nature is the great cleanser of souls. The city destroys; natural surroundings rebuild and offer the opportunity to forgive and grow. (

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ErinDenver | Jun 12, 2017 |

This is one of the most unusual novels I have read for some time. It is written from the perspective of a woman who is sharing about her marriage: How it starts, progresses, falls apart due to her husband's affair and then follows the attempt to repair the relationship. The story itself is mundane, but the way it is told is what makes it unique. Things are related in short, pithy paragraphs. Sometimes these paragraphs are about actual events she experiences and other times they are musings or even quotes from other sources (the narrator is an English Professor). Prior to her husband's affair she narrates in first person, and then after that in third person, as if the marriage problems cause her to not only disconnect from her husband, but from herself as well. (

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bness2 | May 23, 2017 |

Surefire nominee for all the major prizes. (

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TimDel | Feb 2, 2017 |

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thingScore 50

If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side.

added by sturlington | editKirkus Reviews (Nov 27, 2013)

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People/Characters

Important places

Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA

Important events

Related movies

Awards and honors

New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2014)

Slate Top Ten Book of the Year (2014)

The Morning News Tournament of Books (2015)

Folio Prize Shortlist (2015)

PEN/Faulkner Award finalist (2015)

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Epigraph

Speculators on the universe...
are no better than madmen.

Socrates

Dedication

For Dave

First words

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said.

Quotations

But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine. For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

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Vintage Contemporaries

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385350813, Hardcover)

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 Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” 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 catastrophes—a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—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 can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:15:31 -0400)

▾Library descriptions

"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 Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," 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 catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--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 can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel. "--… (more)

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