The untelling5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When things go wrong, how does the “awful weight” of truth compare against the “hollow clatter” of lies ? Can we “untell” lies, can we achieve forgiveness–especially when it comes to family?Īria is a fractured, believable protagonist whose trespasses are all too understandable and yet without reason, whose problems are at once simple and immensely convoluted. But the story gradually reveals its depths, examining how secrets and lies twist and strain relationships beyond repair. There aren’t any literary pyrotechnics here–Jones isn’t pioneering a new style or genre, and prose is accessible and straightforward. ![]() The Untelling is one of those deceptively simple novels that convince the uninformed that writing is easy. And then Aria misses a period or two, and is sick in the mornings, and her belief that she’s pregnant leads to a trail of falsehoods that loop back to her childhood tragedy. The now twenty-five year-old Aria lives in Atlanta, where she has a regular job, and a regular love life with her boyfriend Dwayne. Aria, her big sister Hermione and her mother subsequently led dysfunctional lives under a shell of normalcy, until the girls were old enough to move out. Nine-year-old Ariadne (Aria) was in a car crash that took the lives of her father and baby sister, and left her mother shell-shocked. After reading that piece, I reserved her 2005 novel The Untelling at the library. I first heard of Tayari Jones when someone sent me a link to her blog post explaining why she was boycotting a writers conference in Arizona. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |