THE PENELOPE SHUTTLE OMNIBUS IBD

Sinopsis

This omnibus edition collects the four full-length novels from prolific poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist Penelope Shuttle, published between 1969 and 1980. Shuttle&rsquo,s novels merge poetic language with the novel form unlike virtually anyone else before or since. All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), is a large and dense work, full of rich, poetic imagery, at its heart a love story involving four people. The use of language is taken well beyond its normal descriptive function: bathos where the grossly physical facts of sexual encounters meet the language of myth, or where obscure, slightly comical words are used to describe sexual passion. Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) develops this dense poetic language, abounding in imagery, obscure vocabulary, and beguiling rhythms. Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1978), has a different tone to the previous two: the prose is bleaker, harder and more direct. The story and the prose have a mythic quality and seem to exist in an ahistorical or trans-historical continuum of time and place. The Mirror of the Giant (1980), subtitled &lsquo,A Ghost Story&rsquo,, has two meanings: Theron is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife Vellet&mdash,literally, as Vellet is a character in the novel&mdash,and his current wife Beth is metaphorically haunted by her former female lover Ash, whom she has not seen for five years. These four novels showcase Shuttle&rsquo,s talent for powerful poetic prose at its peak. &ldquo,It could be that Miss Shuttle has become the prisoner of her own verbal inspiration, so that the language is telling her what to do. It could be that I have not yet perceived the relation between the rhythm and the story. This is not a book which gives you all it has on one reading. On the contrary, it is designed to be reread.&rdquo, &mdash, Robert Nye &ldquo,[H]er opening chapters abound in sentences of excessively wrought luxuriance . . . while her closing ones adopt a tone of more tightly disciplined naturalism.&rdquo, &mdash, Andrew Motion