Sleight

by Kirsten Kaschock

Sisters Lark and Clef have spent their lives honing their bodies for sleight, an interdisciplinary art form that combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word. After being estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by a deceptive and ambitious sleight troupe director named West who needs the sisters' opposing approaches to the form—Lark is tormented and fragile, but a prodigy; Clef is driven to excel, but lacks the spark of artistic genius. When a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it. In language that is at once unsettling and hypnotic, Sleight explores ideas of performance, gender, and family to ask the what is the role of art in the face of unthinkable tragedy? Kirsten Kaschock has earned degrees from Yale University, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and the University of Georgia. The author of two collections of poetry, Unfathoms and A Beautiful Name for a Girl , she resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University.

Genres: Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy

286 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2011

About the author

Award winning author Kirsten Kaschock is a poet and novelist who writes across genres. Her background in dance has impacted her work—she consistently addresses intersections between language and body. The author of seven poetry books, she has received fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Subcircle, and the Summer Literary Seminars. Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. She has lived in Iowa, New York, Georgia, and Maryland—and currently resides in Northeast Pennsylvania with her partner. Her work has been called “gothic and intense,” “as fascinating as it is disturbing,” and “inventive and exhilarating.” As Cheryl Strayed once noted: “There isn’t anyone like any single one of us, but the way there is no one like Kirsten Kaschock is a different thing.”

Reviews

[Satyros Brucato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloody brilliant. A rather demanding read, but far more than worth the challenge.

An "experimental prose" novel based in a slightly alternate-history world in which sleight - a rigorous avant-garde art form somewhat like acrobatic butoh as practiced by Mummenschanz - is a world-wide draw, Sleight follows a once-famous troupe as it attempts to regain... and surpass... its former achievements. What might otherwise become a familiar story of dysfunctional relationships, artistic aspirations and domestic conundrums becomes, in Kaschock's fractal prose approach, a revelation of the artistic process through a book in which the words themselves appear to dance from configuration to configuration.

The weakness of this prose device comes from the degree of emotional distance it imposes more or less by default. The spare, at times even notary, distinctions between characters makes it difficult to tell one from the other - and thus, to care much for any of them at all. And yet, the novel had me near tears at certain points, swept up in the transcendent whole it depicted rather than in the lives it portrayed. Shifting from mode to mode - poetry to simple prose to lists to puzzles to word-salad to geometric shapes formed with words - Sleight conjures the tricky methods of its subjects, forcing the reader to break through the limits of common preconception just as the performance art it portrays forces its audience to do the same.

Sleight is not a book for everyone, most especially not for readers who expect familiar plots and comfortable escapes. For folks willing to reach beyond conventional novels, though, this is a fascinating work of art.

[Tricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of most original and captivating books I have read. You won't soon forget Sleight.

Where is the cover??

[pearl]

Added because of China Miéville. Derp.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sleight is disorienting at first: entering the world of the book means picking up its vocabulary, the vocabulary of an imagined form of art called sleight that's part acrobatics, part dance, but something else entirely. One character, early in the book, says sleight is "beyond anything it may have come from. Or out of": she goes on to say that "at several points during a sleight performance—you've got epiphany" (9). More concretely, sleight troupes, which all have nine women and three men, work with "architectures," which are flexible frameworks—glass or fiberglass tubes strung together by fishing wire—shapes that encourage certain movements, shapes that link to other shapes in shifting forms. Sleight is about two sisters, both sleightists: Clef and Lark Scrye, who've been estranged for several years. Sleight is also about the art itself, and about a director named West who reunites the sisters to make his greatest work; by extension it's about art in general, or maybe more about performance-based art in particular: it's about bodies and space and discipline. It's about more than that, too: ambition and motivation and desire, and art's relation to its subject matter and its audience, and family, and connections between people. It's sometimes almost-frustratingly abstract, not-entirely-articulated; it's got touches of magic that never get explained away, or explained at all. But mostly it's delicious and engrossing, and the kind of book I don't want to say too much about. I like Clef and Lark, their resonances and differences. Here's Clef, on why she performs:

I think I sleight because I always have. My mother sent my sister Lark and me, I guess for poise, and I was good. And when you are good and a girl at something, you stay with it—maybe for all the goodgirl words that come. Goodgirl words like do more, keep on, further—instead of the other goodgirl words—the if-you-are-you-will words—be nice and softer and you-don't-like-fire-do-you? In sleight there was less of that so more of me, until there was less. (11)

And Lark, on why she stopped:

"I quit because I was good, and when you're good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious."
"Of what?"
"Of what part of yourself you didn't know you were selling." (92)

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sleight is a different book (small press, professor written) about a troupe of dancers/contortionists/artists whose art, called sleight, is strictly regulated by a set of often arbitrary-seeming international standards. Two troupes, galvanized by a rebel director named West, merge to create a sleight that defies the stringently traditional artform's established rules. Specifically, the sleight aims to use a heavily publicized tragedy involving a couple of child killers by, for one, incorporating into the sleight a film that the killers made of their slayings.

Questions that Sleight compels readers to think on include:
- To what extent is news about tragedy entertainment?
- If the answer is, "To an enormous extent," then what compels us to go along with the idea that real-life tragedy presented in the news is an acceptable form of entertainment when the same tragedy, presented in other artforms, would not be acceptable to us?
- Doesn't the idea that a sleight--or some other artform that sleight might symbolize--must always be objective and never impose opinions or take any obvious stance on anything, lest the audience feel condescended, seem stupid/arbitrary/dangerous?

I wish I could make this book sound as interesting as it is. I can't say Sleight is really entertaining; I had no problem putting it down every 50 pages or so to read my highly boring and technical A+ CompTIA exam guide. But there's something about Sleight that draws you back. There's something about it that makes you not want to plow through it. I think this might be the first book that I've said that about and still loved.

[Fran Hawthorne · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Sleight" isn't just a novel: It is a puzzle, an invented art form, a pseudo-academic treatise (with footnotes), a mystery story, a tale of love in many shapes. The chapters jump around curtly, interspersed with interviews, script notes, and boxes of wordplay. There are "Needs," which are living creatures, and "Souls" that are sold almost like good-luck charms. Author Kirsten Kaschock clearly loves to stretch the English language in new shapes. (One stay-at-home dad teaches an occasional university course "to keep himself whet." A character's teenage acne "haunted her cheekbones and hairline.")

Coursing through all this are several traditional-type plot lines, including the reunion of two estranged sisters and the mysterious eruption of billboards across the world warning that "You are living on the site of an atrocity."

This is not an easy book to read. At times it tries too hard. (With all her creativity, why does the author rely so often on the cliched "interview" technique?) But even the most frustrated reader has to be awed by Kaschock's brilliant imagination and daring. There are few books in the world as original as this one.

[Dale Stromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prose of the novel, lapidary and ruthless, urges lingering reading, sometimes repeated reading: verisimilar and poetic detail kaleidoscopes across the page, bewildering but captivating, challenging us to relish linguistic surprises and ambient undertow. Kaschock’s prose poetics cracks phrases open, splices, undermines comprehension in order to body forth alien meaning, all tinted with penumbral threat, with pain remembered and pain lurking, with ineluctable sadness. The author drops us directly into a disorientating but painstakingly worldbuilt reality, and for me the story resisted literal comprehension for some time before the novel’s internal logic swam into view. This is a book for readers not averse to doing the work of reading.

You can read my much longer review on Medium (un-paywalled link).

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very unsettling. Cerebral. I think the structure of the book fulfills the interdisciplinary art form the book's title comes from. It's not an easy read, but you get rewarded for taking time to get into the world that's been built. A profound darkness haunts the book. The theme of weather or not art has a responsibility to the subject it uses was brilliantly strung together through different kinds of writing. The sibling dynamics are fascinating and gripping and really got to me. I'd say there's a geometric poetry to this book, but I'm not sure what I mean by that.

[indi · Rating 4 out of 5]

disorienting, unvarnished, and indulgent of absence and lack. i really like books that don't hold your hand patiently explaining everything, and despite the footnotes, this is one of them; it's on you to focus enough to decipher the strange spiral of sleighting

[Grackle Birdie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5
unique, challenging, unlike anything i have read before, more poem than prose but sometimes too prosaic, too big and too empty for 5 stars but an interesting experience!!

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very original and artistic book. The story revolves around an art form called Sleight. It is a real challenge to read as you need to disover the characters but also discover Sleight, which is a very unique art form that is explained in very creative ways.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I marked this book as complete, but after 50-60 pages, I just really could not get in to the book. I don't know if Sleight is a real thing or not, but I do know that the footnotes, Souls, and Needs were beyond vague and unnecessary. I did not like this book.

[Dan Schuna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book so this review isn't really a review. Many of the ideas and plot pieces were really interesting but everyday, commonplace events are all WAY to infused with meaning for my tastes. All around this sort of book just isn't for me.

[Ben Serviss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting conceptually, though it fails to live up to its potential. The thing is, it never pretends to have any, so you can't really be disappointed. Interesting mainly for the concept of Sleight it introduces, but I wouldn't say it's a great book.

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

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