![]() In the following chapters, CM meets and interviews other former friends and collaborators of X. She attains a research visa and poses as a journalist in order to visit X’s hometown and interview her parents, ex-husband, and – to CM’s surprise – her son. In attempting to uncover the truth of X’s childhood, CM travels to the Southern Territory – what we know as the US’s southern states – which from 1945 (the year of X’s birth) to 1996 (coincidentally the year of her death) was an independent, fascist country. But Lacey doesn’t stop there: she rewrites the history of America too. This playful telling of fictive stories featuring some of the most iconic figures in 20th-century pop culture would be enough for an entertaining novel. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities. ![]() Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance. ![]() X “lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role” – and CM was her willing audience. But to be part of X’s life was to be “fortunate”. CM admits that early on in their relationship she saw in X “an uncommon brutality, something she used both in defence and vengeance”. She was a trickster, working and living under pseudonyms and in disguises, and a provocateur who didn’t take kindly to being questioned. X, we discover, was an avant-garde polymath, a renowned novelist, musician and artist. ![]() The novel mimics biographical writing: inside Biography of X by Catherine Lacey we find a title page for “Biography of X” by CM Lucca, X’s widow. After all, we read a biography primarily to learn about a person. The premise here – at least at first – is to explain X and her life. In the earlier book, the stranger remains a puzzle. Lacey uses them to test the tolerance of the small American town to which they are a total stranger.īiography of X, the Mississippi-born author’s fourth novel, is just as peculiar, but is in many ways Pew’s opposite. In Catherine Lacey’s novel Pew, the protagonist wakes up during a Sunday church service with no memory of who they are or where they have come from. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |