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The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
'Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar... (It's also insanely funny.)' — Lena Dunham From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a tensely drawn, spellbinding literary thriller. In Vendela Vida's taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. Almost immediately, while checking into her hotel, she is robbed, her passport and all identification stolen. The crime is investigated by the police, but the woman feels there is a strange complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities-she knows she'll never see her possessions again. Stripped of her identity, she feels both burdened by the crime and liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone at all. Then, a chance encounter with a film crew provides an intriguing opportunity: A producer sizes her up and asks, would she be willing to be the body-double for a movie star filming in the city? And so begins a strange journey in which she'll become a stand-in-both on-set and off-for a reclusive celebrity who can no longer circulate freely in society while gradually moving further away from the person she was when she arrived in Morocco.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 27, 2015
      A 34-year-old divorcée takes a 10-day vacation in Casablanca and, after her backpack is stolen, decides to shed her identity, a decision that releases her into the streets of Morocco and the depths of her own past. With her fourth novel, Vida (The Lovers) returns to familiar themes of identity and recovery, concerns that are well suited to stories about traveling abroad. Suspicious of her hotel and the police after the robbery, the woman takes advantage of a clerical error and commandeers another American’s identity: Sabine Alyse. With Sabine’s credit cards, she checks into the Hyatt, where a large film production has taken over the hotel, and soon makes friends with the famous actress starring in the movie. Written in the second person, the novel invites the reader to experience the protagonist’s separation firsthand. And as the woman’s situation becomes more complicated and her actions increasingly brazen, bits of her past are teased out. The result is an emotional and formally clever exploration of identity. Vida’s descriptive powers and restraint help to avoid the repetitive hammering of you that bogs down most second-person novels. Hard-boiled and inventive, the book takes a bold swing at mixing genres.

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  • English

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