I enjoyed this novel, but I’m having some difficulty trying to explain why. It reads, for one thing, like the lyrics to a Dresden Dolls song. It is so crammed with contradictory metaphors that, while the prose is quite lovely, it often betrays its own internal logic, tenuous as it is. Imagine that Jeannette Winterson has read about two-thirds fewer books than she actually has, and has also lost her interest politics and you’ll have a good idea of how Claudia Dey’s prose functions. Not my sort of thing at all, really. And yet I could not put it down.
The plot and characters were very fairy-tale-like, with names like “Eugenia”, “Immaculata”, and “I.I. Finbar Me the Three”. Eugenia, the narrator, is on a quest to find her father, a man who seems, based on his behaviour, to be either a mad artist or a mad hobo, or potentially even both. I’m honestly at a loss; I have no idea what else to say, and the more I think about the book, the more I want to pick apart its flaws. Perhaps someone else could read the book and then explain to me why I enjoyed it so much.
Stunt was my second selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Exotic Dancers, by Gerald Lynch.
