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Knopf
February 2014
On Sale: January 28, 2014
192 pages
ISBN: 0385350813
EAN: 9780385350815
Kindle: B00F1W0DV8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction | Contemporary
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also
a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust,
faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck
that unites us all.
Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred
to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love
letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation,
their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life
and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship.
As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky
baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife
analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and
Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the
lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the
consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the
near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as
she confronts the friction between domestic life and the
seductions and demands of art.
With cool precision,
in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce
longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful
love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through
the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact,
Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single
sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing
meditations on despair and love will linger long after the
last page.
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