Word: budnitz
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...Budnitz employs four women as narrators, all from different generations of the same family, who together grapple with the inconclusive questions of human existence. Ilana's narration greets, and scares, the reader first. Ilana is a woman of the old country, probably Russia, who somehow falls in love with a stranger and finds herself in an unnamed American city. Her journey comprises stories of rape and incest, murder and solicitation, placed in a mythical context of forests and magic. A "man in the forest laughing with little pointed teeth" violates her, yet gives her a Faberge egg. This egg becomes...
...nothing but bloody meat," then describes him "trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets." This display of the grotesque is one of many that causes the reader to wince and writhe; while indicative of her poetic prowess, Budnitz's portrayal of old country rituals offers little to Ilana's narrative and destroys the integrity of her tale...
...Narrators change voice almost arbitrarily as Budnitz jumps from Sashie to Ilana. Aside from the content of each narration, Budnitz makes little effort to create a different stylistic or narrative voice for each one. She intrepidly attempts to address the conflict of old values and new, western values through the interplay between Ilana and Sashie. However, an analysis of dishtowels, tea leaves and hospitalization from two perspectives destroys the potential depth of this exchange. Budnitz tries to be too profound in her simplification, taking on too large a human theme within too small of a context...
...birth to her daughter, Mara, and it continues to unravel with the later insertion of Mara's niece, Naomi, as the final narrator. The work changes from a mythical tract to a soap opera of human fallibility. In the last section of the novel, one gets the impression that Budnitz wants to explore every facet of the human experience: mother and daughter, east and west, moral dilemmas and cheap symbolism...
...Mara is compulsive, jealous, hyper-analytical and destructive. She "walks as if the floor is thin ice. She checks beneath the cushion of a chair before sitting; she counts the knives in the silverware drawer." Through Mara, Budnitz explicates mental illness and the rationality of murder. This is too ambitious for her plot and narrative, especially given Mara's stream-of-consciousness rants. Had the rest of the novel not been so richly descriptive, this technique might have been effective. Instead, each thought staggers, laden with a false sense of importance and significance...