Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Description
When Elspeth Noblin dies, she leaves everything to the 20-year-old American twin daughters of her own long-estranged twin, Edie. Valentina and Julia, as enmeshed as Elspeth and Edie once were, move into Elspeth's London flat and through a series of developing relationships a crisis develops that could pull the twins apart.
Original publication date
2009-09-25
Media reviews
Niffenegger’s story is written with a lightness of touch and with a great eye for the oddities of human behaviour.
Niffenegger has always identified loss as her main subject, but here at least it’s dissolution: the grim inevitability of decay. The theme of doubleness feeds into this. Valentina wants to break free of the controlling Julia and live her own life, but can she survive without her? Forced
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togetherness, the “fearful symmetry” of the title, can lead to a diminution of individual identity, a merging of personalities. Sometimes apartness is preferable. Show Less
Instead of fabricating ghosts and faux-Englishmen, it's a shame that Niffeneggers didn't just cut away all the cobwebby Halloween trappings and write a moving, realistic story about a man with OCD who is trapped for real, rather than ersatz, reasons in a flat overlooking a cemetery. She sustains a
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mood, but it is vaguely repellent, rather than enjoyably disquieting. Instead of a lingering, unforgettable ghost story, this is the novelistic equivalent of a cut-rate séance, a parlour game complete with Ouija boards and cheap theatrics, as unconvincing as knuckles rapping under tables Show Less
Niffenegger is an extraordinarily sensitive and accomplished writer, and Her Fearful Symmetry is a work of lovely delicacy... But Her Fearful Symmetry is not a book of great emotional force, not the way Time Traveler's Wife was.
Mysteries and truths slowly unravel as the story progresses. The major plot resolves predictably, but its grim inevitability fits well with the genre, and a few more surprising twists produce an even more satisfying read than Niffenegger’s bestselling debut.
Her Fearful Symmetry is Audrey Niffenegger's gravely buoyant new novel of phantom loves and all-too-tangible fears.
There is something very self-indulgent about this book: At times you feel that the author wrote it for herself rather than for her readers, an uncommon feeling when reading fiction.
Lovers of Niffenegger’s past work should rejoice. This outing may not be as blindly romantic as “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” but it is mature, complex and convincing — a dreamy yet visceral tale of loves both familial and erotic, a search for Self in the midst of obsession with an Other.
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“Her Fearful Symmetry” is as atmospheric and beguiling as a walk through Highgate itself. Show Less
Although the reader is pleasantly carried along by the author’s ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts, the novel lacks the emotional depth of its predecessor; none of the relationships in this novel have the intensity or poignancy of Clare and Henry’s liaison
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in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” Show Less
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2011)
Whitcoulls Top 100 Books (41 — 2010)