The Effect of Living Backwards

by Heidi Julavits

Paperback, 2003

Status

Available

Call number

813.6

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Putnam Adult (2003), Edition: First Edition, 336 pages

Description

Alice and Edith are sisters, best friends, and arch-enemies. Alice, the 'good girl', is everything the stunning, wanton and morally whimsical Edith is not. Both have an unhealthy attraction to shame and disgrace, and both are expert manipulators - a power that is tested and exploited when the plane they are travelling on is commandeered by a blind terrorist in what may or may not be a hijacking. When Alice is chosen to communicate with the hostage negotiator, Edith decides to align herself with the terrorist. Inexplicably drawn to the negotiator, Alice finds it harder and harder to distinguish allies from enemies in what begins to feel like an elliptical airborne game show. Trapped on the plane with a pill-popping pregnant heiress, archaeologists on their way to a reunion, a wealthy, womanising Indian man and a dog named Verne, Alice learns valuable lessons about sibling rivalry, love and about who she is -- even while she's pretending to be someone else.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member abirdman

A good book with an odd plot about a dubious experiment.

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LibraryThing member jayne_charles

This is one of those hall of mirrors-type books where not everything is as it seems. I couldn’t help thinking I might have liked it more if that side of things had been kept secret until close to the end rather than being splashed all over the back of the book and laid bare in the first chapter.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing is superb, the energy invested in even the tiniest detail hugely impressive. I suspect I have only teased out one tenth of its meaning. The only bit that didn’t quite ring true was the voice of narrator Alice, who is painted as plain and unloved yet she comes across throughout as sparkly, bubbly and full of wit and energy.

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LibraryThing member aliceunderskies

This one started out entertaining--I liked the narrator's hostility and sharpness, and was intrigued by the introduction--but I very quickly became disenchanted. Maybe I'm just not ready to read a farcical, satirical romp about terrorism. It's possible. More likely, the author simply failed to

convince me on every level: plot, characters, tone--everything. I ended with a sense that Julavits didn't really know what sort of a book she was writing--political commentary? family drama? inquiry into the nature of identity? examination of the nature of humanity based on how quickly it dissipates in extreme situations? Julavits tried to do all and failed at capturing any, in large part because of this fracturing overambition, but also because of her over-attachment to being clever, detached, and postmodern.

Two stars not because "it was ok"--it was not--but because I have read far worse books and would like to save the dread one star for them. And Julavits' lauded (by the blurbs, at least) "savage humor" did indeed amuse me a couple of times on a sentence level, and I was mildly interested in the sibling dynamics for maybe a quarter of the book. Overall, though, the book failed to create any emotional or intellectual resonance at all.

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LibraryThing member Eoin

3.5 stars. Shame stories and life-long manipulations. Worth it, but recklessly implausible.

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