Description
Description
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica--an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.
Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, "Veronica" is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.
About the Author
About the Author
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Gatiskill is enormously gifted. . . . [Veronica] is a masterly examination of the relationship between surface and self, culture and fasion, time and memory." --The New York Times Book Review
"Gaitskill has written a novel that will leave you shaking and joyful simultaneously, dizzy with the proximity of private terror and bottomless hope." --O, The Oprah Magazine"Twisted, beautiful, grotesque, graceful, and exceedingly well-executed. People write their whole lives in the hope of coming up with just one sentences that rises to the level of this book." --The Sunday Oregonian
"Gaitskill taps into a deeper vein of emotional force, and with vivid language and an absorbing architecture, she delivers her most affecting, sophisticated work to date." --The Boston Globe
"Beautiful, devastating. . . . Gaitskill devotes almost religious attention to language and to our failure to make our lives as grand as the art we love. There are paragraphs like poems in Veronica that lure you back, over and over." --Elle
"Gaitskill writes so radiantly about violent self-loathing that the very incongruousness of her language has shocking power." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Sensuous and precise. . . . Veronica captures the nexus between the erotic glamour [of the 1980's] and its epic heartlessness." --Entertainment Weekly
"Gaitskill writes from the gut . . . [Her] characters bleed, sweat, cry, and they experience sadness, anger and love as much as a physical sensation as an emotion." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Gaitskill's style is gorgeously caustic . . . Her ability to capture abstract feelings and sensations with a prescise and unexpected metaphor is a squirmy delight to encounter in such abundance." --Heidi Julavits, Pubishers Weekly
"[Veronica] creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up. It's art that you can continue to see even with your eyes closed." --Francine Prose, Slate
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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