Word: elspeth
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Niffenegger is not, as far as I can ascertain, a twin, but she is a consummate pro, and she gives it a solid try. Edwina and Elspeth--the mom and the aunt--are estranged from each other, and when Elspeth dies, she leaves her apartment, which overlooks Highgate Cemetery in London, to her twin nieces Julia and Valentina, on the condition that they spend a year living there. Julia and Valentina are 20 years old, ash blond, pretty and skinny. They're bright, aimless, dreamy college dropouts who live at home. They don't have jobs. They're virgins...
Julia and Valentina flit off to London to their luxurious new apartment--which turns out to be haunted by Elspeth, who is perplexed to discover that she has become a ghost. "What am I supposed to be learning from the spiritual equivalent of house arrest?" she wonders. "Is this an oversight on the part of the celestial authorities?" She can't leave the apartment, though she can, with great effort, nudge physical objects. (Thus vindicating the "noetic science" of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol...
...land of perfect oneness, asymmetries are afoot. Valentina wants to go out into the world and be a fashion designer. She feels trapped and smothered by their twinnish dyad. Julia wants to keep things as they are and feels betrayed by Valentina's growing independence. The distracting presences of Elspeth (whom only Valentina can see) and two attractive male neighbors push the girls further off balance. They can't stay together, and they can't separate. Something will have to give...
...much will we care when it does? Niffenegger is an extraordinarily sensitive and accomplished writer, and Her Fearful Symmetry is a work of lovely delicacy. With its gravestones and ghosts and pallid, hollow-eyed waifs, it's pure goth porn. At times, it's more. When the lonely phantom Elspeth, longing for solidity, snuggles her ectoplasmic self into a little desk drawer for comfort, it's so viscerally convincing, you wonder how a corporeal being could ever have imagined...
...Everything in it--the apartment, the cemetery, the two sets of twins, the crossword-composing, obsessive-compulsive classicist upstairs--is fashioned with such twiddly bespoke neatness, such fussy perfection, that the whole affair is like a tragedy performed by exquisite dolls: lovely and precious and lifeless. Only the spectral Elspeth feels real. And what does it say about a novel that the one character who feels alive is a ghost...