Dra-

Начало книги

Her name is Dra—. That’s D, R, A, dash. Like her name, the heroine of Stacey Levine’s first novel is shadowy, incomplete. This story about a woman whose identity is so imperiled that she can make almost no moves toward adult life is both haunting and laugh-out-loud funny.

The novel turns that most banal of activities, the search for a job, into a nightmarish pilgrimage of regression and lost selfhood … In polite, literate prose that evokes Kafka, Levine characterizes the quest for employment as a virtually hopeless bid for access to some kind of normalcy. The demands of the adult world seem arbitrary if not malevolent, and Dra— is repeatedly derailed in her job search by her longings to succumb to passivity and infantilism. A visit to an employment agency provokes in her an overpowering — and hilarious — craving to go to the doctor, to lie down and be examined for an internal disorder, or even more attractive, to be in the presence of the doctor’s bewitchingly understanding Nurse.

Читать дальше →