Sunrise
The Old West also takes center stage in Téa Obreht’s masterful fourth novel ... The result is pure fun. Who hasn’t wanted to breach the roped-off areas of a house museum, peek into the boudoirs and rifle through the drawers to find the sexier story hiding behind the scene? Obreht does that here, letting her imagination run wild ... weaves together three distinct timelines with three sets of characters, and delightfully mashes up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga ... Obreht is at the top of her game in Sunrise, offering a moody, suspense-driven plot, sharply drawn characters and succulent prose.
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Obreht flexes her skills as a literary writer who deploys a thriller’s pacing, the vivid description crucial for realistic historical fiction, and the steady, calm voice of a central narrator, our entry point into a multifaceted tale of abuse and generational trauma ... Obreht is a writer who doesn’t rush into easy patterns of storytelling but seizes control from the jump ... What may feel like a puzzle in these pages is in many ways an accordion. Obreht allows the stories of both the past and the present to speak for themselves as connections surface throughout the course of the book ... Obreht distinguishes herself as a spellbinding writer who recognizes the ways that mythologies bend the truth to dazzle us with stories that capture a larger history. Sunrise is a blistering look at the mythologies we just can’t shake.
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Téa Obreht’s novels teem with conflicting narratives, treacherous landscapes and speculative fictions ... Obreht’s portrayal of Colin Yard – his gradual, desperate slide from favoured son to villain of the piece – is a brilliant piece of theatre ... Throughout all three of her interwoven timelines, Obreht raises similarly searching questions about courage and cowardice, idealism and pragmatism, and most of all about how history is recounted and who gets to own it ... The novel does have its flaws. While the eventual revelations about Nina’s relationship with the ghastly Ben feel devastatingly real, it is difficult to ignore the loopholes in logic that characterize Nina’s portions of the narrative...None of this detracts from the fact that Sunrise is an engrossing, original and thought-provoking novel, effortlessly readable and beautifully told. Given that most of what we come to know about Vargas is itself a series of fictions, it perhaps makes better sense to frame Nina’s miraculous survival as similarly mythic.
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