J faces a certain ennui: she is alone, she lacks a mate, yet her inner life is a vivid struggle to find happiness, to connect with the world outside her apartment. Maybe it’s due to the oppressive heat or her active imagination, but Ovid and Miami begin to blur: she sees Ovid’s girls (as the narrator refers to them) in the trees, people who transform, and symbols everywhere. She befriends her enigmatic and troubled neighbors on the floor above her and becomes further and further entangled with them. As she contemplates retiring from love for good, she cares for her aging cat, Buster, and a duck stranded on a traffic median. She’s been contacting some of her various lovers from the past, whom she refers to as “Sir Gold,” “The Devil,” and other monikers-but none of them lead to anything serious.
J spends most of her days going to the pool, working on translating (or “transmuting”) Ovid’s stories, sitting on her balcony, and watching her neighbors in a building across the way. The narrator of Alison’s ( The Love-Artist) wonderful novel, J, lives alone in the paradise of a Miami Beach high-rise condo.
0 kommentar(er)
