Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Niffenegger's ghost story is a stirring meditation on doubleness featuring twins Valentina and Julia; their mother, Edie and her twin, Elspeth; the two halves of Highgate Cemetery in London; the Western duality of body and soul. Audie Award–winner Bianca Amato gives a brilliant performance: Julia and Valentina's voices are differentiated just enough to tell them apart; Elspeth is Oxbridge refinement, but her twin has Americanized her accent. Amato's greatest challenge is Martin, a brilliant crossword setter whose neuroses prevent him from leaving his flat. Amato gives him a wit and allure that let the listener become as entranced with him as Julia does. This well-paced and lustrous audio will mesmerize and delight. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, July 27). (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. "Entertaining... The reader is pleasantly carried along by the author's ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago and London. She has published two novels, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry , and many illustrated books including The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. She is currently at work on The Other Husband , a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is now an HBO series. From AudioFile Once again, Niffenegger proves herself to be a master storyteller, carefully enveloping her listeners in an unlikely plot. Bianca Amato's skillful narration takes twins Julia and Valentina from their Chicago home to their late aunt's flat near London's Highgate Cemetery. Amato outfits Julia with a confident American accent, while portraying Valentina, aptly nicknamed "Mouse," as meek and trapped by her relationship with her sister. Eccentric neighbors Robert and Martin play an integral role as secrets are revealed and "Mouse" finds an effective, if otherworldly, way to free herself from Julia's death grip. Listeners will applaud Niffenegger's skill in bringing plausibility to the unthinkable and Amato's range of accents and pacing. J.J.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. "The endurance of love animates this gothic story set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Niffenegger's prose can be wearyingly overblown, but she has a knack for taking the romantic into the realm of creepiness, and she constructs a taut mystery around the secrets... It's no small achievement that the revelations are both organic and completely unexpected."-- The New Yorker "Bewitching...Lovers of Niffenegger's past work should rejoice... Her Fearful Symmetry is as atmospheric and beguiling as a walk through Highgate itself."-- Susann Cokal, New York Times Book Review (front page)"Frighteningly smart... Millions of readers who enjoyed The Time Traveler's Wife ... will find a similar theme in Her Fearful Symmetry : romance that transgresses all natural barriers.... Deliciously creepy."-- Ron Charles, Washington Post "A compelling modern-day ghost story set in and around London's atmospheric Highgate cemetery...An engrossing love story that crosses to the 'other side,' Symmetry offers an inventive take on sibling rivalry, personal identity and what it's like to be dead."-- People (3 1/2 stars)"Niffenegger piles on plenty of action... The book's end [is] a genuine surprise... Elspeth's death ... is moving, as is Robert's surprising immediate reaction to it... [Martin] is intricate and fascinating, especially because of Niffenegger's ability to get inside his head.... Niffenegger is especially good on the subject of twins... [She] deftly plumbs the depths of her subject, showing a profound and imaginative understanding."-- Martin Rubin, Los Angeles Times "[A] gravely buoyant new novel of phantom loves and all-too-tangible fears."-- O , the Oprah magazine"Niffenegger is an extraordinarily sensitive and accomplished writer, and Her Fearful Symmetry is a work of lovely delicacy."-- Lev Grossman, Time "Following up a phenomenal blockbuster is not easy, but Niffenegger rises to the task with Her Fearful Symmetry . Fans will find plenty of rewards in her clever ... [and] unique modern ghost story... Her descriptions transport the reader directly into a moody Victorian landscape of beauty and death... Mesmerizing... A deeply moving story filled with unforgettable characters... A beautiful testament to Niffenegger's fertile imagination and love of storytelling."-- Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times "An intriguing look at kinship and the danger of getting what you wished for."-- Good Housekeeping "Entertaining... The reader is pleasantly carried along by the author's ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts."-- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles More than a month before Halloween, the most sophisticated horror stories are already crawling out of the ground. You think you're safe over there in the primly maintained Literary Fiction section of the cemetery, peering across the rusty gate at Stephen King's "Under the Dome" (Nov. 10), Anne Rice's "Angel Time" (Oct. 27) and even a sequel to "Dracula" written by -- please, no! -- Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew (Oct. 13). But meanwhile your genteel old friends have already been hideously transformed: Sarah Waters leads this bone-chilling pack with a Jamesean ghost story called "The Little Stranger," which has a good shot at winning the Booker Prize next week. Dan Chaon's "Await Your Reply" pays homage to everybody from Peter Straub to H.P. Lovecraft, and Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" has been re-stitched by such non-horror writers as Peter Ackroyd and Laurie Sheck. In short, there's nowhere to hide this year from frighteningly smart, scary novels. The latest to join this infernal group comes from Audrey Niffenegger, author of the phenomenally popular "Time Traveler's Wife," which means her new one has a good chance of haunting the bestseller list, too. As naturally as she used elements of science fiction in the past, she borrows the tropes of Victorian Gothic here for a story that seems, at first, more interested in whimsy than terror. "Her Fearful Symmetry" doesn't reveal its spectral elements for more than 60 pages, and when the first ghost does make an appearance, "gaining opacity gradually," the scene is strangely poignant and witty, like a visitation from Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit." But Niffenegger manages to breathe life into these dead cliches, noting at one point that the soul leaves the body "slippery like an avocado stone popping out." Millions of readers who enjoyed "The Time Traveler's Wife," or endured the recent movie version, will find a similar theme in "Her Fearful Symmetry": romance that transgresses all natural barriers. But this new novel also recalls the odd illustrated book that Niffenegger published in 2006, "The Three Incestuous Sisters." A visual artist and printmaker, she spent 14 years working on the intaglio pictures for that tale of sibling rivalry, and "Her Fearful Symmetry" suggests that she's still preoccupied by this unsettling subject. As the story opens, two college dropouts, identical twins Julia and Valentina Poole, have inherited an apartment in London and several million pounds from an aunt they never met, their mother's identical twin, Elspeth. With nothing else to do and no particular interests, the twins accept this generous bequest, leave their parents behind in Chicago and move into their late aunt's flat. Below them lives Elspeth's bereaved lover, a much younger man named Robert, who's writing a history of the cemetery next door. And above them lives Martin, an agoraphobic man with obsessive-compulsive disorder who writes esoteric crossword puzzles for several British newspapers. "Her Fearful Symmetry" is rather thinly plotted and at least 100 dilatory pages too long. One chapter begins with the damning confession, "Days went by and nothing much happened." But Niffenegger creates such marvelous scenes of muted sadness and smothered affection that you don't entirely mind that the parts are better than the whole. Her portrayal of the lonely crossword writer, for instance, is funny and sad, even if never particularly integral to the story line. Surrounded by barrels of bleach, winding through his labyrinth of boxes while counting backward from 1,000 in Roman numerals, poor Martin is trapped in a loop of anxieties. He spends his days pining for a woman who loves him but can no longer endure his compulsive routines. Meanwhile, Robert, the young historian who lives beneath the twins, fleshes out the story's Gothic trappings in all their luxurious agony. The subject of his ever-growing dissertation is London's Highgate Cemetery, where he volunteers as a guide, offering historical commentary to tourists and nursing his raw grief for Elspeth. Niffenegger is clearly in love with this beautiful, funereal place, too; she worked as a guide there herself, and at the end of the novel she includes a plea for donations that's hard to resist. For Robert, Highgate is a prism "through which he could view Victorian society at its most sensationally, splendidly, irrationally excessive . . . a theatre of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose." In other words, it's the perfect place to tempt a rational young man into macabre speculation about contacting his dead lover. But what starts like Patrick Swayze's erotic pottery scene in "Ghost" eventually slips off center to something closer to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Niffenegger slowly draws out the relationship between the indolent young twins in a strange dance that's alternately charming and sinister. Julia and Valentina, it turns out, aren't exactly identical -- they're "mirror-image twins"; all Valentina's internal organs are on the other side of her body. "They were essentially one creature," Niffenegger writes, "whole but containing contradictions." The fey one, Valentina, wants to study fashion design, while her more aggressive sister just wants to keep her safe. Their sisterly devotion sounds sweet until it seems suffocating, with a touch of incestuous frisson that would leave Edgar Allan Poe queasy. Tensions between Valentina and her controlling twin eventually push the plot to a bizarre crisis involving body-snatching and soul-swapping. It's a disorienting shift into the dark logic of fairy tales. But keep the children away and dust off the Ouija board; you're about to make contact with something deliciously creepy. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Critics didn't express high hopes for Niffenegger's second novel—a ghost story, mystery, and love story combined into one. Nonetheless, comparisons to the acclaimed Time Traveler's Wife prevailed. Certain similarities exist, including themes of the elusive nature of love, loss, obsession, and time. However, that's where the likenesses end. While a few reviewers cited the characters in Her Fearful Symmetry as compassionate, if self-absorbed, creations, others called them emotionally distant and unconvincing. Differences also existed with respect to the believability of the subplots—buried secrets, cases of mistaken identities, and ghostly appearances. Yet if Niffenegger's latest novel doesn't quite live up to her previous one, readers willing to fully suspend their disbelief will embrace this evocative, at times compelling, ghost story. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009 : Following her breakout bestseller, The Time Traveler's Wife , Audrey Niffenegger returns with Her Fearful Symmetry , a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry. The novel opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister back in Chicago. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julie and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience like one of their obsessively matched outfits. Historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeth's home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors: Elspeth's former lover, Robert; Martin, an agoraphobic crossword-puzzle creator; and the ethereal Elspeth herself, struggling to adjust to the afterlife. Niffenegger brings these quirky, troubled characters to marvelous life, but readers may need their own supernatural suspension of disbelief as the story winds to its twisty conclusion. --Brad Thomas Parsons --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From The New Yorker The endurance of love animates this gothic story set in and around Highgate Cemetery, in London. When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her estate, including an apartment overlooking the graveyard, to the twin daughters of her twin sister, from whom she has been estranged for twenty years. When Valentina and Julia show up to claim their inheritance, they soon discover that Elspeth is still in residence, in ghostly form. Niffenegger’s writing can be wearyingly overblown, but she has a knack for taking the romantic into the realm of creepiness, and she constructs a taut mystery around the secrets to be found in Elspeth’s diaries and the lengths to which she will go to reunite with her younger lover. It’s no small achievement that the revelations are both organic and completely unexpected. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The End Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup. Later he would remember walking down the hospital corridor with the cup of horrible tea in his hand, alone under the fluorescent lights, retracing his steps to the room where Elspeth lay surrounded by machines. She had turned her head toward the door and her eyes were open; at first Robert thought she was conscious.In the seconds before she died, Elspeth remembered a day last spring when she and Robert had walked along a muddy path by the Thames in Kew Gardens. There was a smell of rotted leaves; it had been raining. Robert said, "We should have had kids," and Elspeth replied, "Don't be silly, sweet." She said it out loud, in the hospital room, but Robert wasn't there to hear.Elspeth turned her face towards the door. She wanted to call out, Robert , but her throat was suddenly full. She felt as though her soul were attempting to climb out by way of her oesophagus. She tried to cough, to let it out, but she only gurgled. I'm drowning . Drowning in a bed … She felt intense pressure, and then she was floating; the pain was gone and she was looking down from the ceiling at her small wrecked body.Robert stood in the doorway. The tea was scalding his hand, and he set it down on the nightstand by the bed. Dawn had begun to change the shadows in the room from charcoal to an indeterminate grey; otherwise everything seemed as it had been. He shut the door.Robert took off his round wire-rimmed glasses and his shoes. He climbed into the bed, careful not to disturb Elspeth, and folded himself around her. For weeks she had burned with fever, but now her temperature was almost normal. He felt his skin warm slightly where it touched hers. She had passed into the realm of inanimate objects and was losing her own heat. Robert pressed his face into the back of Elspeth's neck and breathed deeply.Elspeth watched him from the ceiling. How familiar he was to her, and how strange he seemed. She saw, but could not feel, his long hands pressed into her waist - everything about him was elongated, his face all jaw and large upper lip; he had a slightly beakish nose and deep-set eyes; his brown hair spilled over her pillow. His skin was pallorous from being too long in the hospital light. He looked so desolate, thin and enormous, spooned around her tiny slack body; Elspeth thought of a photograph she had seen long ago in National Geographic , a mother clutching a child dead from starvation. Robert's white shirt was creased; there were holes in the big toes of his socks. All the regrets and guilts and longings of her life came over her. No , she thought. I won't go . But she was already gone, and in a moment she was elsewhere, scattered nothingness.The nurse found them half an hour later. She stood quietly, taking in the sight of the tall youngish man curled around the slight, dead, middle-aged woman. Then she went to fetch the orderlies.Outside, London was waking up. Robert lay with his eyes closed, listening to the traffic on the high street, footsteps in the corridor. He knew that soon he would have to open his eyes, let go of Elspeth's body, sit up, stand up, talk. Soon there would be the future, without Elspeth. He kept his eyes shut, breathed in her fading scent and waited. Last Letter The letters arrived every two weeks. They did not come to the house. Every second Thursday, Edwina Noblin Poole drove six miles to the Highland Park Post Office, two towns away from her home in Lake Forest. She had a PO box there, a small one. There was never more than one letter in it.Usually she took the letter to Starbucks and read it while drinking a venti decaf soy latte. She sat in a corner with her back to the wall. Sometimes, if she was in a hurry, Edie read the letter in her car. After she read it she drove to the parking lot behind the hotdog stand on 2nd Street, parked next to the Dumpster and set the letter on fire. "Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson," Edie had replied. He'd let it drop.Jack knew this much about the letters because he paid a detective to follow his wife. The detective had reported no meetings, phone calls or email; no suspicious activity at all, except the letters. The detective did not report that Edie had taken to staring at him as she burned the letters, then grinding the ashes into the pavement with her shoe. Once she'd given him the Nazi salute. He had begun to dread following her.There was something about Edwina Poole that disturbed the detective; she was not like his other subjects. Jack had emphasised that he was not gathering evidence for a divorce. "I just want to know what she does," he said. "Something is… different." Edie usually ignored the detective. She said nothing to Jack. She put up with it, knowing that the overweight, shiny-faced man had no way of finding her out.The last letter arrived at the beginning of December. Edie retrieved it from the post office and drove to the beach in Lake Forest. She parked in the spot farthest from the road. It was a windy, bitterly cold day. There was no snow on the sand. Lake Michigan was brown; little waves lapped the edges of the rocks. All the rocks had been carefully arranged to prevent erosion; the beach resembled a stage set. The parking lot was deserted except for Edie's Honda Accord. She kept the motor running. The detective hung back, then sighed and pulled into a spot at the opposite end of the parking lot.Edie glanced at him. Must I have an audience for this? She sat looking at the lake for a while. I could burn it without reading it. She thought about what her life might have been like if she had stayed in London; she could have let Jack go back to America without her. An intense longing for her twin overcame her, and she took the envelope out of her purse, slid her finger under the flap and unfolded the letter. Dearest e, I told you I would let you know - so here it is - goodbye. I try to imagine what it would feel like if it was you - but it's impossible to conjure the world without you, even though we've been apart so long. I didn't leave you anything. You got to live my life. That's enough. Instead I'm experimenting - I've left the whole lot to the twins. I hope they'll enjoy it. Don't worry, it will be okay. Say goodbye to Jack for me. Love, despite everything, e Edie sat with her head lowered, waiting for tears. None came, and she was grateful; she didn't want to cry in front of the detective. She checked the postmark. The letter had been mailed four days ago. She wondered who had posted it. A nurse, perhaps.She put the letter into her purse. There was no need to burn it now. She would keep it for a little while. Maybe she would just keep it. She pulled out of the parking lot. As she passed the detective, she gave him the finger.Driving the short distance from the beach to her house, Edie thought of her daughters. Disastrous scenarios flitted through Edie's mind. By the time she got home she was determined to stop her sister's estate from passing to Julia and Valentina.Jack came home from work and found Edie curled up on their bed with the lights off."What's wrong?" he asked."Elspeth died," she told him."How do you know?"She handed him the letter. He read it and felt nothing but relief. That's all, he thought. It was only Elspeth all along. He climbed onto his side of the bed and Edie rearranged herself around him. Jack said, "I'm sorry, baby," and then they said nothing. In the weeks and months to come, Jack would regret this; Edie would not talk about her twin, would not answer questions, would not speculate about what Elspeth might have bequeathed to their daughters, would not say how she felt or let him even mention Elspeth. Jack wondered, later, if Edie would have talked to him that afternoon, if he had asked her. If he'd told her what he knew, would she have shut him out? It hung between them, afterwards.But now they lay together on their bed. Edie put her head on Jack's chest and listened to his heart beating. "Don't worry, it will be okay." …I don't think I can do this. I thought I would see you again. Why didn't I go to you? Why did you tell me not to come? How did we let this happen? Jack put his arms around her. Was it worth it? Edie could not speak. They heard the twins come in the front door. Edie disentangled herself, stood up. She had not been crying, but she went to the bathroom and washed her face anyway. "Not a word," she said to Jack as she combed her hair."Why not?""Because.""Okay." Their eyes met in the dresser mirror. She went out, and he heard her say, "How was school?" in a perfectly normal voice. Julia said, "Useless." Valentina said, "You haven't started dinner?" and Edie replied, "I thought we might go to Southgate for pizza." Jack sat on the bed feeling heavy and tired. As usual, he wasn't sure what was what, but at least he knew what he was having for dinner. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more