Jane Unrue, Life of a Star, Burning Deck, 2010.“An actress of sorts, a woman recalls her childhood, longs for her absent lover, imagines traveling overseas, and wanders through gardens and galleries of art. Hers is a life meticulously lived, a carefully crafted and rehearsed engagement with a real and imagined world; a search for love and meaning that has left her, in the end, alone. Unrue’s intricate and intriguing sentences — now one word, now comprising whole paragraphs and interrupting one another — manage to fuse detachment and emotion, heartbreak and humor.”
“Artifice is at the heart of Jane Unrue's latest novella, a sequence of short, poetic reflections by an unnamed, lovelorn protagonist. This is not to say that the narrative lacks heart; if anything, this compact tour de force interrogates the truism that art can be either heartfelt or cerebral. The narrator has a passion for theatricality. Her ruminations are peppered with stage directions: "
'You’re right,’ I said (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself)." Her episodic memories of lost love share a similar staged quality, as much preoccupied with props as the dramatic action itself: “H
ow I had waited for a moment when the setting and the lighting indicated we had finally found our scene, the scent of roses as if atomized through tiny tubing woven through the fence.” Behind the stagecraft, however, Unrue’s protagonist seems to search for an authenticity that she fails to find in the intimacies we take for granted. Provocatively, Unrue inverts the dichotomy of being on versus off the stage. If the narrator of
Life of a Star feels like she is acting her way through life, it’s because so much of it is played out through assigned roles (child, woman, artist). By foregrounding narrative artifice, Unrue suggests new possibilities—both personal and aesthetic—such artifice obscures. The narrator’s comically surreal tryst on a cruise ship, and her memories of her actress mother, are among the most evocative sequences in a narrative that reveals emotional truths rather than evades them.” -
Pedro Ponce“I wish I had a better story for you,” confides the unnamed narrator a third of the way into Jane Unrue’s new miniaturist novel, though there’s hardly cause for so modest a claim. With just over one hundred pages, some of them hosting no more than a wee phrase or the clarion burst of a sentence, and most of them giving out well shy of the bottom margins, the novel, though slender, is emotionally thorough, dense but not crammed, and unnoisily original in the bloodbeat and quiver of its prose.
Unrue writes intricate, ribbony sentences that often reel themselves into the safeholds of eccentrically stacked, unindented paragraphs as lyrically loaded as Joseph Cornell boxes. Sometimes these gracile ribbons get snipped short of tidying grammatical resolution; the narrator, we learn, is in fact something of a mean whiz with a scissors and a knife.
Nearing (or already well submerged in) the loneliness and lovelessness of early middle age, she’s the daughter of a washed-up actress, and though not officially an actress herself, she has discovered the only certain way to insert herself acutely into experience: to regard every instant as an opportunity for performance, for representing herself rather than entirely being herself (and whatever further self-discovery that might finally require). So confused is her life with theatricality that rain falls “
as if it had been yanked from buckets poised on rafters up above,” and stage directions are tucked into her thoughts, slipcased between parentheses—
“(Full-body modesty)”; “(Mild eyebrow tip)”; “(single-handed heart-grip).” “Since there is artificiality in mere utterance,” she’s convinced
she “must live the words.”But life, as she practices the living of it, amounts to casting herself into an ever-narrowing repertoire of melancholy enactments unfolding mostly in the galleries of a museum (through which, profusely ruffled and garbed in preposterous layerings of underskirts and other costumic outlandishments, she kills hour after hour skulking coquettishly, hoping to pry one or another man loose from an alarmed wife) and by the fountain in a public garden, where she suffers little more than half a dozen rendezvous with, one gathers, her only lover ever, a worldly man who is apparently married (it’s a furtive, futureless courtship). From these outings she returns, unconsoled, to the ticktock isolations of her rented room, where she spinsterishly busies herself with embroidering a bumblebee onto a pillowcase (her goal, fittingly enough, to arrest the buzzy wingbeats into a stitchy stillness) and broods over her rooming-house childhood, during which the arrival of an alluring slip of a girl with dollhouse manners and a goshing vocabulary left her feeling upstaged, driving her to rages of violent jealousy. Her mother admonishingly declared, of all things, “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with these histrionics.”
But the narrator is scarcely one for foolery. Three-quarters of the way through her account, she brashly encapsulates the desperate program of her life in a dizzying, self-aggrandizing, one-sentence manifesto: “
The one who stimulates attraction to herself by molding her complexities to meet a given situation and by demonstrating, at the same time, the effect her having on the situation has upon her own self, wins.” By now, though, she has been rehearsing herself further and further away from the heart-quickening enmeshments of life and deeper into claustral despair. Small wonder, then, that images of graves and buried girls figure so tormentingly in her imagination; it’s as if she wishes to be pulled alive from the burial pit of her part-playing self.
Inviting itself to be read as a phantom refinement of the celebrity-autobiography genre, Life of a Star, direly melodic and winsomely elliptical, belongs in that rich vein of contemporary fiction that forgoes narrative overrun, overmuchness of dialogue, and reportorial sprawl, and instead dispenses itself in slivery, pivotal declarations and gleaming summation. It’s a novel cored to the climactics, the crucialities—and it’s entirely a perfection.” —
Gary Lutz“In Jane Unrue’s third novella an unnamed woman visits galleries, fountains, and piers, and observes the underweight litany of her existence. This is a book to be read all at once with a long evening spreading ahead, in order to best note the slow, dexterous rising of tension, the avid portrayal, and the bare yet startling language. Unrue punctuates the unnamed woman’s thoughts (they occur while she does her needlework, visits the museum’s garden, and wanders in a city where she seemingly has no acquaintances) with muted intensity. Unrue’s sentences are as calm as they are discerning, often running against one another and interrupting in humor and emotion:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times I seemLook how her––!wonderfully, oddlyShe’s not one little bit––!'
Mine is a woman’s face, though something of the child hides back behind the surface of my veering eyes.
Prose vignettes - at times one line takes up a whole page - read like private journal entries, and reveal a woman who is either on the verge of a crisis or has barely survived one. With time we learn the woman is a kind of actress - a failed actress, a closeted actress, a successful actress are all strong possibilities. The woman bitterly recollects a carefree girl from her youth who ended up acting (“
I was diminished by her”) and the memory of this girl is followed by a taunting line from an adult, which appears in quotes and occupies a page: “
Child, have you ever aspired to perform upon the stage?” These and other tidbits make it clear that once upon a time the woman had wanted to be an actress, and that now she is not (or never was). In fact, the ambiguities regarding the narrator’s occupation and her general background serve to highlight the incandescent and disturbing tension Unrue has created in the narration throughout the book:
'
I pick the scissors up. A sparkling vision fills my head, those long-gone Christmas Eves and other nights-before when I would feel the glittering gaze of someone peeking in to see if I was just pretending to be asleep or if I really was asleep. I clip it, thread it, knot it at the end, and tell myself I wonder if I’m acting now.' We are in limbo, just like the narrator. We find grounding in the woman’s memories of her childhood and of the conversations she once had with her lover. The conversations appear to us snipped, but they are beguiling. The woman and her lover converse on the nature of isolation, their relationship, and sex. That was the woman’s past.
In the present, the woman stares into the eyes of the subjects of Renaissance paintings, she plays a femme-fatale role (self-cast) at a gallery in the museum, and also hires herself for a part she wrote for herself. This last role is a “straightforward though deeply layered story” about a woman who lives in a one-room flat above her mother’s defunct flower shop. The woman acts out the role in a voyage, on a boat deck. Wearing an evening gown and donning a sea-pearl evening clutch, the woman concentrates on her manner and poise. The woman plays the role, rehearsing the execution in grueling and intensive practice sessions, so that “
I, please God, might not convey to those around me evidence of jealousy, resentment, malice, desperation, anything.”
Life of a Star reads as though Marina Abramovic or Allan Kaprow truly succeeded in erasing the lines between art and life - but the result is disturbing. Akin to the hair-rising fear we feel from looking down an abyss, we look upon the nameless woman playing her voyage role, reacting to the passangers on the boat as if her fellow actors, and we wonder how far she will be able to go without finally stepping into insanity:
'
Soft blonde hair, her dress black taffeta, a beaded coral cardigan around her shoulders, she moved gracefully, so pretty, and he uttered something to her that I could not understand before I heard him tell her clearly, rather loudly, that he’d screw her (she had downward eyes) until she’s bleed (soft face; not shocked). Then suddenly she ran away.'
The mother-character in me wept for daughter’s bitter disappointment as the father in me shrank in weakness to confront that bastard piece of shit, while she, the woman that I really was It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.'
Unrue strikes on a narrative drama that is interspersed with ordinary epiphanies, which reveal a life richly lived, but underscored by a quiet, masterful tension. The woman’s triangular connections with the world and her self (when the self she knows is slipping) are utterly intriguing. This is a portrait of a woman entering art and losing herself in it, increasingly unable to find the center of her own emotions.
Life of a Star is a book for theorists, art lovers, academics, but mostly general readers who are both grateful and uneasy to find a writer who experiments with blurring the line of art and life.” -
Ingrid Rojas Contreras“Jane Unrue creates a truly riveting novel that brings new perspective on the woman’s search for love, and so much more. “Life of a Star” is a top pick for literary fiction collections.” —
Midwest Book Review“A woman, alone, embroiders a bumble bee onto a pillowcase and, while doing so, she recalls the first play she ever saw, how she once terrified a young rival into leaving town, how she seduced the married man by a public fountain.
Life of a Star by Jane Unrue is the story of a woman embroidering her life. The unnamed female narrator reveals to the reader that, though she was never a professional actress, acting has deeply influenced her. As a child she constantly noted the way others were perceived and, in doing so, learned how to control the ways in which she was perceived. Her remembrances are peppered with stage directions, such as in an argument with her mother: “
And I hate (looked:sink) you (mirror) too! (Floor.)” Her mother was a professional actress, but the narrator uses the craft of acting as a lifestyle choice rather than a profession. Instead of making money off her acting skills, she makes relationships.
The most emotional recollections are those surrounding an unnamed ex-lover, a married man. These moments, as all moments in the book, are recalled out-of-order, but the encounters with the lover are differentiated in that they are numbered in chronological order:
“Encounter number four. ‘You’re right,’ I said, (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself).” The narrator uses the same self-employed stage directions with the man she loves and she did with her mother, constantly manipulating the distance between herself and the other through this carefully constructed artifice.
The novel unfolds as a series of disjointed thoughts, images, scenes, and memories. The book is 112 pages long, but may be read in a single sitting. No scene lasts for more than a page and a half, and an entire page may contain only a single sentence:
“It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.”“New needle. (Bigger eye.)”“Black satin thread emerges through a tiny hole: beginnings of a body.” When multiple sentences do appear on the same page the language goes to the opposite extreme, becoming complex and lyrical:
“Retracing all your steps along the corridor of trees, to search for an escape look up and see if you can find a dirty-looking star above this dead-eyes image of a garden conjured as if just to keep you from returning to the woman underneath you in your bed and telling her that it was only sadness for the many losses in your life, the many tragedies you’ve see, that caused your gaze to wander toward the wall.” It becomes difficult to get your bearings in a sentence such as that, especially in the middle of a story that is being told unchronologically by an unreliable narrator. It becomes essential, then, to approach the novel as you would a poem, to untether yourself from the presumptions of narrative and allow the sentences to grab you and pull you along like a riptide.
When the narrator decides she wants to close her self-created dramatic distance she finds herself unable to do so, commenting
“it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves.” Having practiced fake emotion so well for so long, she has robbed herself of the ability to show genuine emotion in a genuine moment. This touches on an even greater question: is it possible to react genuinely once you’ve peered behind the curtain and seen the power of staged drama?
Ultimately, the narrator discovers through her musing both that she desires emotional intimacy and that she absolutely cannot have it. And even as she recalls her life to the faceless reader, she ponders the question, “I wonder if I’m acting now.”” –
Dana Norris“Anxiety suffuses much of
Life of a Star, Jane Unrue’s lapidary bloodletting, and much of it is borne from the narrator’s bemoaning of language’s limitations, memory’s imprecision, romance’s sudden changes, and the seeming impossibility of love. The novella, composed of luminous, evocative fragments, is much like a mosaic wall, albeit a ruined one, missing patches of tiles, where the viewer must fill in the necessary blanks. Incredibly perceptive and imaginative, the unnamed narrator elliptically relays her brief moment in the limelight, her strained “encounters” with a lover, her attempted suicide, and her difficulties with finding a language to seam the mangled threads of her life together into some kind of whole:
'No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach.'
It’s a despair familiar to any writer who, continually exploring the vast resources of language, still finds him- or herself incapable of generating the proper vocabulary, syntax, and narratological framework to encompass the baffling complexity of psychological and emotional experience, of pain in all its forms. Emotionally off-kilter, the narrator isn’t satisfied with what she sees, feels, and thinks unless her experiences are given some kind of form or contained in a concrete way. She’s utterly self-conscious and spilling over with doubt:
“It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.” Finding “artificiality in mere words,” she feels she must “live words.” Wandering naked in an idyllic scene, she distances herself from her surroundings by wondering how to contain it, capture it, control it: “It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, and my naked body coming, going too.” Oscillating in time, the narrative also sometimes shatters into incomplete sentences, mirroring the narrator’s own fractured perception of both her past and present. And many of these fragments are intruded upon by other voices:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times I seem Look how her—! Wonderfully, oddly She’s not even one little bit—!'
Unrue’s performance is quite arresting, here. Her poetic renderings of consciousness are expertly handled: she carefully maps her narrator’s vacillations and her confused outlook on life; and she harnesses the flotsam and jetsam of external things: the observations and judgments from other people she’s collected over the course of her troubled life. The narrator, embroidering, sewing, and stitching in the midst of her reveries is, at times, overwhelmed by her fanciful surroundings and the gravity of her personal history. Her own expressive inventorying serves as a way of bringing sense to the senselessness in her life:
“To be alive requires that we build a catalogue of like-like images and stolen words and phrases, things we can put to use.”Immersed in these wrenching scenes, where Unrue’s melancholic lyricism overflows, it’s easy to feel like her narrator who, after reminiscing about kissing her lover says, “This was a moment when the image and the words collide, the kind of moment people live for.” At one point, the narrator, embroidering, compiles a wish list of all the things she needs for her craft. This list could also serve as the best summation of how this novella was put together for it, too, is a “
catalogue of patterns, stitches, backgrounds, combinations and suggestions, useful bits and pieces, images.” Unrue’s imaginative precision gives way to indeterminacy, clarity to tentativeness, cohesion to dislocation. The events and images in this world are delivered in a sensuous prose that harkens back to Carole Maso, another accomplished master whose prose belies great intelligence, insight, and a willingness to submit to the seductive power of the sentence. Think of
Life of a Star, then, as an illuminated viewfinder, one where parallax, ambiguity, blur, and discontinuity may impede immediate recognition, but one which still impresses through the sheer power of its startling imagery and commanding poetics, its accretion of clues and repetitions. In the end, all of the fragmentary, floating images in Life of a Star finally cohere into an enigmatic portrait of a burned out visionary, an object lesson on the fleetingness of desire, of the perpetuity of pain, on the doubtful, but nevertheless worthwhile, possibility that language may bring meaning to life, or, at the very least, help one to endure its vicissitudes.” -
John Madera“arrived the other day courtesy of Waldrop generosity.
I started it tonight and read to page 62, just over half the little novel.
It's quite good.
I was already a fan of Jane Unrue.
Googling her just now, she seems to be a well-kept secret.
For now.
But that situation cannot last when one writes as well as she does.
Jane Unrue reminds me in an odd way of Jane Mendelsohn (
I Was Amelia Earhart).
They both write subtle novels composed of almost ectoplasmic prose.
In a weird way, it's like an inheritance of the Jamesian thing (the supernatural James anyway).
But they conveniently clean up his ridiculously Byzantine grammar and tool sentences and paragraphs of much more palatable length.
They keep that Jamesian mystery inherent in grammar itself, but they get rid of the Jamesian sprawl.
I suppose Mendelsohn's vampire novel is a bit slight, but I liked it. She was sort of the literary belwether on that, as vampire erotic lit broke shortly after her first novel along those lines.
But the Amelia Earhart novel was wonderful.
I listed Unrue's book
House on my shortlist of "The Ten (or was it Twelve?) Books by Burning Deck Press You Should Own."
This one is about strange-fitting clothes of the erotic.
Also, it is about the torturously well-fitting clothes of jealousy.
Jealousy's ridiculous sartorial splendor.
And the wreckage that follows.
As usual, Unrue shows us that a straight line or direct stare is always the longest distance between two points we are trying to use to reperer in any real investigation of the world.
(Sorry, Kaplan's novel uses the French verb on every other page and now it's stuck in my head!)
Unrue's prose is deliciously Lobachevskian like that.
The irreal is found, as ever, to be more convincing. At least when it comes to that strange creature we call narrative.
She writes very well.
I see I have missed a novel, Atlassed, which came out in 2005, which I will need to hunt down.
And I see she published a novella in the swan song of 3rd Bed, Vincent Standley's wonderful magazine (of which I was happy to be a part on more than one occasion).
I probably actually have that somewhere in this house or the old one.
I'll try to review this when I finish it.
I can already recommend it.
Stylistically, it's that delightful mix of novelistic innovation and unapologetic anachronism--that thing so many contemporary French novelists (yes, P.O.L!) do so well.
P.S. Love Keith Waldrop's cover art for this!” -
Willliam Keckler“Reading Jane Unrue’s novel
Life of a Star is similar to the experience of entering a quiet room and seeing the broken shards of a glass figurine lying on the floor and though when seeing the wreckage one is not familiar with what the shards once composed while intact, the essence has not changed—the figurine exists broken, it’s brokenness animated to high art.
The novel is made up of brief sections no more than two pages long. The unnamed female narrator at the center shifts back and forth between childhood and adulthood, between angst and agony, between galleries of art, the sewing of a bumble-bee pillowcase, lovelorn encounters and an early envy for a little girl “…far more likely to dazzle than” she could ever be. She hasn’t always been alone, but she is now.
What does this narrator want? Certainly the title is a wry play on words. The narrator is in an incredible amount of pain. She is a star only in her own multitudinous mind that announces stage directions for her to enact like “(Full body modesty.)” “(Eyes wide.)” “(Repeat for other side; wrist up.)” Her best performances, solo of course, are not attended:
That night, all husbands, wives, long gone, the water was so quiet underneath the little bridge, dark foliage all around, a moon up high, and I was wearing nothing on my body or my head. It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, my naked body coming, going too. p. 94
The “naked body coming, going too” might be the sine qua non of this entire endeavor. The narrator and her stories can’t keep still. She searches, spins and hams her way into a container impervious to other people. Escape, even from such agonies as lovers sleeping with others can never be commensurate with the self-flagellation in its wake:
…I lay there on my bed and wished I had not tried to lift you off my floor and bring you back into the bed…” Don’t tell me that you love me,” you said. He’s already gone, I thought, my gaze up at the ceiling flooded as if by a bucket full of liquid silver pouring down into my eyes and in my mouth. p.71
The last sentence is a Lynchian dissolve, a rainbow shimmer and ungluing of sense that stomps any snaky sentimentality and keeps loss lyrically stifling.
One may wonder what sense this journey into dark sludge has—where is the uplift, where lies redemption? but Unrue has gone into the well many scribblers have spelunked. As in Rilke’s novel
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, there are mystical childhood encounters, the changing galleries and gardens the narrator wanders through, the bumblebee pillowcase (reminiscent of the mother’s lace), and the concern with how to make prose sing (to be seen shortly). Each also concerns singular narrators who want to be more than they’ve become, but first they must struggle to see the world. Unrue (like Rilke’s directive from the
Sonnets to Orpheus) “
dances the orange” through a fine needlework of phraseology that takes what is melodrama and heightens it, producing not so much the life of a star, but the scrawl of a poet planting and detonating verbs, adverbs and nouns into sinuous strobes of sound:
No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach. P.104
Her text is the toil that separates her. The narrator is conscious of other ways to communicate but the struggle carries both the singe of the past and the problem of the future. Is there understanding? Is there a way to see truth and breathe into the pain? Unrue’s narrator does plenteous breathwork and the result is a tidy but by no means lean novel wherein the cries to stay private get choked by a willowy wordsmith, a shooting star—shot and fallen.” –
Greg Gerke
Jane Unrue, Atlassed, Triple Press, 2005.“Where does one go after Joyce? This fiction shows the possibility of a way beyond his shadow. Or the possibility of the nutrition that can grow from it. A collection of fictions in Unrue's precise, evocative style with section such as:"Looking Sideways" and "Hands Emerging Out of a Black Background." Perfectbound, with an elegant cover designed by Deron Bauman.”
“Somewhat on the Joyelle McSweeney page maybe, Unrue creates these worlds that exist nowhere but in her books, like little mirrored halls that go on forever, and new new new language mashes, I loved this, 'The Snarl is on the Mask' is one of my new favorite stories.” –
Blake Butler“Jane Unrue's
Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of
Paterson or
Leaves of Grass—except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. "
Brow and Chin Variations," or
"Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission"). These headings supply in large part the "unity" of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.
At first, the separate chapters seem thrown together, ill-fitting lyric improvisations, voiced by different speakers on different topics. By the end of the book, what unites these pieces becomes much clearer—a kind of aesthetics of dissection, a discomposition of the elements of the body and a re-rendering of the human form as mosaic. This is elegantly expressed in a phrase that I read as a sort of mission statement for the book, from a section titled "A Neatly Folded Pile of Clothes" (a title at once evocative and ironic):
That same day I'd seen a temporary residence designed by different architects to occupy a plot of land devoted to the exhibition of new works of art. Each architect had been assigned a portion of the residence; they brought their portions in by truck, then everything got put together. That the pieces did not fit and that the residence looked unappealing was, I guessed, supposed to be the beauty of it. (134, emphasis added)
Perhaps this in part explains the continual linkage between love and violence in Atlassed, since one of the questions this book repeatedly asks is whether there is "any sort of line dividing deep-felt pleasure from the icy horror of a white-hot violent encounter?" (110). And this is in a sense, the exact experience of reading Atlassed; it is full of sequences that are at once erotic and horrifying, others that are evocative and enigmatic. Moreover, Atlassed always creates the sense that a greater conceptual unity exists, and that we are doomed to desire it forever. In "Table, Heart, Breasts, Kidneys," Unrue suggests that even a family on a road trip may feel an unrequited desire for a map, to render the events of their life, their stubborn anomie in the face of absolutism, easier to comprehend:
A sense of loss like nothing ever known is passed from family member on to family member in the car, each person holding fast to something: steering wheel, a seatbelt buckle, handle on a door. A slippery drop of rain has hit the windshield, and the father conjures up an image of two massive feet of stone adhered for centuries to the ground. (119)
The family knows that "mapping" is an impossibility, and that any attempt at its broad, totalizing vision will result in an image that is incomplete, disorienting. Unrue goes on to say that
This miracle, this nightmare, this at once so terrifying and enchanting scenic drive—it winds from left to right across the outer portion of the mighty granite wall, diminishing the sense of trust felt by the mother and the children toward the car, the tires, and the ability of the man behind the wheel to keep the car from swerving suddenly and plowing through the railings in the road. (119)
In the end, the book is a sort of revelation in reverse—Unrue brings the veil of language between the reader and the illusion of realism, suggesting dark and frightening possibilities beyond our ken that are at the same time exhilarating. Like the "leafy vines" in "Passion (Asleep),"
Atlassed "rocks you in the manner of the darkest pleasures you have yet encountered" (155). Reading
Atlassed is at times mystifying; but in the end, its alchemic blend of imminent horror with immanent revelation and its apocalyptic mixture of mystery and desire, create a dark and evocative beauty that is both enigmatic and enlightening.” -
Gunnar Benediktsson
Jane Unrue, The House, Burning Deck, 2000.“A woman wanders from room to room, or ventures outside, and throughout the ensuring procession of locations, ruminations, or dreams, is transported into the past, or to a love affair, or a marriage, or into the future, or to an ending, perhaps her own."
“Jane Unrue's extraordinary prose unfolds within the confines of a mythological house: I used to walk when the moonlight was just enough to make the metallic structural elements (the rest of the house as if missing) appear to be coming at me from all sides. 'I know those door frames and window frames are not really coming at me,' I remember saying, 'but it sure does look as if they are.' In restless, suspended sentences that seem to push closure beyond the horizon, a woman wanders from room to room or ventures outside.”
"Quietly plumbing the intimacies of architecture, landscape, and domesticity, Jane Unrue's debut,
The House, develops a muted intensity through serial blocks of meditative prose... Displaying the influence of writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Bachelard, Charles Olson and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Unrue successfully forges an evocative approach that could be seen as metacubist in its dizzying, varied takes of the familiar world." -
Publishers Weekly
