Oasis

by Laureen Vonnegut

Overview

A Russian beauty, her dead Moroccan husband and a tiny oasis of bizarre and untrustworthy characters conspire to make a fever dream of a novel in this rich debut. The Western Sahara desert is to some a void, to others a refuge, and to still others a home worth fighting for. Lili stumbles into the centre of this exotic world as she escapes a husband she never wanted, even as he lies gasping in the sand next to his expensive car, his gold chains ripped from his neck. But why have they come to this desolate place and why has she stood calmly by while he takes what must be his final breaths? "Oasis" is thrilling from page one, taking us from the cold of poverty-stricken Russia to the depths of the Bosphorus, the high-priced hotels of Morocco, and the sandy, sultry confines of a shimmering oasis, where Lili finally comes to rest long enough to unravel the lies that have driven her to this tiny outpost of humanity. Set against a political conflict that is tearing the Sahara apart under her feet, "Oasis" is women's literary fiction at its finest - part love story, part mystery, but entirely a rapturous read. Laureen Vonnegut's debut is a timeless tale of one woman's struggle to overcome her life of captivity and call the world her own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582433608
Publisher:	Counterpoint Press
Publication date:	09/28/2006
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Laureen Vonnegut 's fiction has been published worldwide and was short-listed for the Ian St. James Award in England. She is the writer and co-producer with Bruno Coppola of the short film Stuff That Bear!, which has won fifteen awards at international film festivals. She lives in Romania.

Editorial Reviews

An impoverished Russian sold into sexual slavery at 15, Lili, now 22, finds herself at the mercy of a band of Sahara oasis dwellers after abandoning her Moroccan "husband," who dragged her into the desert on a murky business deal and was felled by a snakebite. Lili fears she will be hunted down and jailed because she refused to drive him to a hospital. "The Arab," as she refers to him, repeatedly raped her, yet he also sprang for an education and fancy clothes. Lili desperately tries to determine if her newfound desert companions are foes or friends: is a Spaniard really searching for a silver mine, and who is the mute "lunatic" who lives in the bushes and tends the camels? Does the Berber sell camels or land mines, are his two black-robed wives trying to poison each other or Lili, and is an Algerian runaway wife some kind of insurrectionist spy? The premise that Vonnegut (cousin of author Kurt) tenders in this debut is gripping, and her Sahara comes to life vividly. But Lili's opacity frustrates, and her confusion comes at the expense of an underdeveloped plot. Readers not versed in the region's political conflicts will find the motivations difficult to track. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In Vonnegut's debut, we first meet Lili in the Western Sahara desert. She has been abandoned by her Moroccan lover/captor, who has purchased her from a Madame specializing in beautiful imported Russians trained to be docile "wives" to their potential buyers. Slowly, Lili unfolds her tragic history, which is interspersed with her present secrets and adventures with a cast of one-dimensional characters who adopt her into their odd communal oasis. In her attempt to find her way back to civilization, Lili becomes entangled in the wavering agendas of the runaway Ouma Midhat and his wives, Fatima and Raja; the Spaniard Gabriel; and the unknowable "lunatic." Her account is told in a pervasively melancholy, dreamlike narrative bereft of descriptive analysis of either the characters or the environment. The plot methodically unfolds to reveal a highly unlikely culmination, but it is skillfully woven together with elements of which Lili had tantalizingly informed the reader earlier in the narrative. Ultimately, good triumphs in the form of the most elusive of these slippery characters, and we are led to believe that he and Lili live happily ever after. Certainly, the style and scenes of this drama reflect Vonnegut's experiences as a screenwriter. Recommended for literary fiction collections. Lamia Doumato, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A tall, blonde beauty finds herself in the Sahara in this debut novel. Lili is a 22-year-old Russian woman. Sometime after the fall of Communism, she was sold to a woman named Madame Mer, and, at the age of 15, sold again, this time to an Arab. Her story begins in the middle of the Sahara, just as she and the Arab are having an argument. He forces her out of his car, then follows her into the desert and is bitten by a snake. Lili assumes that the bite is fatal, and she crawls off into the sand, waiting to die. That this opening scene raises more questions than it answers is typical of this novel. Vonnegut builds her slim narrative from hazy, dreamlike, bluntly obscure vignettes, and she peoples her story with an ostentatiously eclectic cast of ciphers: a girl who has visions, a tattooed woman with a scandalous past, a Spaniard looking for a silver mine, a paranoid camel trader, a mute lunatic. The claustrophobic effect she achieves echoes the novel's mercilessly hot, dusty, isolated setting, but the relentlessly furtive tone eventually becomes wearying; the reader is never given enough information to care about the characters or their actions. Seemingly portentous phenomena fade into pointlessness. People and events are joined by coincidence, but these dramatic twists of fate never coalesce into a meaningful whole. The central mystery is, ostensibly, the true identity of Lili: What part of her is real? What's left when she strips away the identity bestowed by Madame Mer and enforced by the Arab? Vast, vacant and extreme in its demands, the Sahara could have been an ideal crucible for Lili's rediscovery or reinvention of herself. Instead, Vonnegut uses this forbidding landscape as a stagefor enacting a series of absurdist set pieces that seem to be filled with significance but which never reward sustained scrutiny. A novel as dry and empty as the desert in which it is set.

Kirkus Reviews