The Weight of Water
by Anita Shreve
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anita ShreveEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-01-07
ISBN: 0316780375
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316780377
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Weight of Water
Book Review: A pleasant and haunting surprise of a book
Summary: 5 Stars
Jean, a photographer married to a poet, comes to the Isles of Shoals with an assignment. She has chartered her brother-in-law's boat so she can do the shooting for a photo essay on the 1873 murders of two women in this desolate place. Aboard with Jean are her husband, Thomas; five-year-old daughter, Billie; brother-in-law Rich; and Rich's current girlfriend, a gorgeous banker named Adaline. Jean wakes each morning to the sounds of Rich and Adaline in the forward cabin, and she thinks about her marriage - both its history, and its current state. She struggles against the jealousy she feels whenever Billie shows interest in Adaline, and she quickly finds herself drawn into the research for her assignment. Smuttynose, the island where the murders took place, lies vacant now; but Jean's vivid imagination shows it to her as it must have been in 1873, with the all adult extended family of a Norweigan immigrant fisherman crammed into a tiny house of which only the foundation footprint now survives. She pictures the life that Maren, the wife of that fisherman, must have lived here through the bitter and sometimes deadly winters - the endless, grinding work, the isolation, and the enforced togetherness of people huddling around a heat source in order to stay alive. All this becomes clearer to Jean as she reads her way through Maren's 1899 letter from Norway, sent decades after the crime that Maren survived while her sister and sister-in-law died. Jean steals both the original letter and its English translation from a special collections repository, where it has been lying uncatalogued and therefore may never be missed.
This stream-of-consciousness novel moves back and forth between Jean's narration and that of Maren, from far in the past. Each woman struggles with a different set of family attachments, and with a different array of jealousies and suspicions that play out against the unforgiving and at times dangerous setting of Smuttynose. In the book's final chapters each of these two stories comes to a startling and violent climax, one that in each case flows naturally from all that has come before - but that nevertheless comes as shock to the reader. I had no intention of finishing the novel when I sat down one winter evening and picked up where I'd left off, about halfway through it; but I found myself unable to put it aside and go to bed when bedtime came. It turned out to be one of those rare books that insisted on being read the rest of the way through, after which it left me with its images still running through my head.
Did it work that well for me because I spent my first winter on a Maine island that has no bridge to the mainland, no electricity, and no phone service? The same island where I spent stretches of my childhood, making Shreve's depictions of 1873 Smuttynose easy for me to inhabit? Because I have worked for much of my adult life in a government document repository, where thefts of uncatalogued original (and irreplacable) materials such as Maren's fictional letter and its transcript are a constant risk in the absence of sufficient staff to monitor the patrons at all times? I don't know. As readers we all react to an author's work based on the experiences we bring to it, and for me this book "clicked" to a degree that the only other Shreve novel I have read - "The Pilot's Wife" - didn't. I enjoyed that book, but this one I loved.
--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Granite Island"
Summary of The Weight of Water
"I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?" The question is posed by Jean, a photographer, who arrives on Smuttynose Island, off the coast of New Hampshire, to research a century-old crime. As she immerses herself in the details of the case--an outburst of passion that resulted in the deaths of two women--Jean herself enters precarious emotional territory. The suspicion that her husband is having an affair burgeons into jealousy and distrust, and ultimately propels Jean to the verge of actions she had not known herself capable of--actions with horrific consequences. Everywhere hailed for its beauty and power, The Weight of Water takes us on an unforgettable journey through the furthest extremes of emotion.A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational ax murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. (Can you guess which one?) She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness. The plot weaves between the narrative of the eyewitness and Jean's private struggle with jealousies and suspicions as her marriage teeters. A rich, textured novel.
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