Justine

by Alice Thompson

Overview

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Justine is a painting, a doppelgänger and a woman of beguiling beauty. Set in contemporary London, Justine is a story of a man’s obsession with a woman - or is it two women? For Justine has a twin sister Juliette, and as the story unfolds, the opium-dazed narrator becomes increasingly unsure as to the identity of the woman he desires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784630324
Publisher:	Salt Publishing Limited
Publication date:	10/12/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alice Thompson was born and brought up in Edinburgh. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her second novel, Pandora’s Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other novels are Pharos, The Falconer and most recently Burnt Island. Alice is a past winner of a Creative Scotland Award. She is now lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University.

Editorial Reviews

A postmodern, feminist variation on the Marquis de Sade's book of the same name, this American debut from Scots writer Thompson is a compelling, though abstract, meditation on identity and desire. The nameless male narrator, a handsome, wealthy aesthete whose physique is marred by a deformed foot, owns a portrait of a beautiful young woman named Justine. At his mother's funeral, he spies the portrait made flesh, but the real Justine leaves before he can speak to her. Later, he thinks he sees her again at an art museum, but this slightly less beautiful woman turns out to be Justine's twin sister, Juliette, whom the narrator seduces in hopes of finding her sister. When he does finally meet his reclusive beloved, she tells him that she is being stalked by an obsessive fan of her just-published novel, whom she fears is trying to kidnap her. Then Justine is apparently kidnapped, and Juliette also abruptly disappears, leaving the increasingly delusional narrator to search for the truth. More intellectual entertainment than explicit or transgressive fiction, Thompson's novel recalls John Fowles's "The Magus" or Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy" more than it does the perverse and menacing work of de Sade which will doubtlessly come as good news to some readers.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Scottish writer Thompson's second outing is her first here, and while some will groan at its jejune, vapid, imitative clunkiness, others will be smitten by its psycho-feminist puzzlings and probings. With debts to Henry James, Oscar Wilde, the Marquis de Sade, etc., etc., etc., Thompson takes a nameless and reclusive hyper-aesthete, makes him god-like of face and club of foot, surrounds him with glorious objets dþart in his Kensington Gardens flat, and has him fall passionately in love, with a portrait on the wall. Whether he's in love with the 'real' Justine or the 'ideal' Justine of the portrait, whether he loves the woman or wants to þownþ her, remain (as theyþve long, long had a way of doing) central to the mysteries, mazes, dreams, terrors, and tortures that follow, with an outcome that readers will have to find out for themselves. Our narrator, though, thinking himself divinely blessed by the fate of being spoken to by the real Justine in the stacks of a library ("Why me? Because of your face. It is like Michelangelo's Adam reaching out to God."), ends up tricked, then tricked and tricked again not only by Justine but by Justineþs twin sister Juliette, even to the point of committing a murder (uh-huh, it's very, very, very gory) in order to save Justine from a murderer of her own, though from then on, things go badly indeed for Narrator, who will follow mazes and enter houses he's seen in dreams, find himself behind bars, lose his club foot, and... But one mustn't tell too much. Admittedly, there are brief moments, especially near the end, of psychological interest, mystery, even a certain penetration, though the road to them is well paved withbanality (However, I could hardly take what she was telling me seriously, it read like something out of a bad detective novel). For those, only, who like their mind- and gender-teasers in novel' form.

Kirkus Reviews