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Carrying the Body
Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably. A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.
126 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Dawn Raffel
18 books84 followersDawn Raffel's illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Previous books include a critically acclaimed novel, Carrying the Body, and two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division.
Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies—most recently The Best Short Fictions 2016 (selected by Stuart Dybek) and The Best Short Fictions 2015 (selected by Robert Olen Butler).
She was a fiction editor for many years, helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor for seven years, and subsequently held senior-level "at- large" positions at More magazine and Reader's Digest. In addition, she served as the Center for Fiction's web editor. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania.
She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations, specializing in memoir, short stories, and narrative nonfiction. She is also a certified yoga instructor and teaches embodied creative writing.
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney will be published by Blue Rider Press (a division of Penguin), July 31, 2018.
Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies—most recently The Best Short Fictions 2016 (selected by Stuart Dybek) and The Best Short Fictions 2015 (selected by Robert Olen Butler).
She was a fiction editor for many years, helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor for seven years, and subsequently held senior-level "at- large" positions at More magazine and Reader's Digest. In addition, she served as the Center for Fiction's web editor. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania.
She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations, specializing in memoir, short stories, and narrative nonfiction. She is also a certified yoga instructor and teaches embodied creative writing.
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney will be published by Blue Rider Press (a division of Penguin), July 31, 2018.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 4, 2019
I was not prepared for the innovative prose and fever-pitched story that Raffel weaves so deftly. This brief novel in stories and fragments won't appeal to everyone, but I drank it in and marveled at each clipped, concise, broken, poetic, loaded sentence. It takes some time to become comfortable with what the author is doing. But I soon found myself drawn in to the dreary world she paints with dabs of words like an impressionist painting. I envied her brilliant construction and know this is something I could never achieve myself. I loved the fragments that appear to be nothing, bits of useless prose, but on second and third readings take on mammoth proportions.
A train enters the scene every night, spewing soot, and the tale of the Three Little Pigs keeps resurfacing to underscore and help explain the story.
The main narrator (simply called "aunt") is trapped in the house in which she grew up, and is taking care of her elderly father. A bit of mystery that becomes exposed later in the novel, an errant sister who returns with a sick son who will capture your heart, alcohol infusing the delivery of the narration, keen observation for details of a world, a life of objects ("The house flashed before her as if it were a life"), all throttling to a startling conclusion.
I loved it and will read it again someday.
A train enters the scene every night, spewing soot, and the tale of the Three Little Pigs keeps resurfacing to underscore and help explain the story.
The main narrator (simply called "aunt") is trapped in the house in which she grew up, and is taking care of her elderly father. A bit of mystery that becomes exposed later in the novel, an errant sister who returns with a sick son who will capture your heart, alcohol infusing the delivery of the narration, keen observation for details of a world, a life of objects ("The house flashed before her as if it were a life"), all throttling to a startling conclusion.
I loved it and will read it again someday.
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May 25, 2019Prose Too Carefully Tended
On the dustjacket Patricia Volk is quoted as saying Raffel is "one of America's freshest voices since Faulkner," and setting aside what it might mean to say that America has needed something as "fresh" as Faulkner, the identification is accurate. Raffel's prose also has echoes of McCarthy and Proulx, but it is if anything more carefully tended even than theirs. The sometimes very short chapters have been published in a range of literary magazines, and they bear the imprint of North American MFA programs. Every line wants to show evidence that it has been seriously and tirelessly pondered. Sometimes it's possible to guess at three, four, or more cliches that have been avoided in order to find the better word. Many lines have been condensed nearly to some irreducible imagist point. (The first of many acknowledgments at the beginning is to Gordon Lish.) This is from the opening page:
"The sight of her, the aunt thought: wan unironed sister in the light. The hand a fleshy visor. Useless. To have traveled like this, with the heat and with the child, in the festering light, no bags but bags, the aunt observed..." (p. 5)
The book continues with this density for a hundred pages, which seem, at the speed of reading, to be 300 or more. Some drawbacks of this sort of writing:
1. Inevitably, if every line is interrogated, there will be moments of excessive, and therefore distracting invention. For me the first was on the second page, where the unnamed aunt's sister is said to have "a bra strap dingy as unrinsed teeth." That qualifier must have been Raffel's eighth or ninth try at an adjective, and it's good. Bras are rinsed, and can have the color of dirty teeth, but the simile is so wrought that it's mainly distracting.
2. Inevitably, there will be moments of over-writing. On the same page there's this (the aunt is trying to get her sister and child on their way home):
"'Shall we?' she said. 'Shall we hasten?' she said, and her sister--a touch, a breast, a way of moving, Mama to the child, Elise her name--said yes." (p. 4)
"Elise her name" reminds me of the intentionally awkward grandiosity of the less successful stories by Proulx, McCarthy, and others. It's supposed to sound at once modernist (in its inventiveness) and pioneering or rural, or perhaps even mythic and faux-Homeric. But who talked like that, exactly?
3. This sort of abbreviated qualifying phrase, together with the aspiration to conjure some indefinite past or timeless present (with echoes, here, of Steinbeck as well as Hemingway) lends itself to poetic repetitions. These can be obtrusive. For instance "That it was not kept up is not open to question," or "The child appeared to be looking at the aunt with what appeared to the aunt to be a fever in the eyes." (p. 6) These repetitions aren't from ancient tragedy or epic: they are knowing, hyper-eloquent, MFA-quality decisions, and therefore mannerisms.
These sorts of problems might not be visible, or at least not bothersome, if the writing occasionally relaxed into other modes. But it doesn't. It seems that for Raffel--maybe as she understands Lish, Volk, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and a dozen others she thanks--really good prose needs to survive a ferocious interrogation. That is certainly often true, but it should not appear to be true in every paragraph on every page. It feels as if Raffel is fighting a doubly losing battle: to avoid every cliche (while unhappily creating new ones all along the way), and to rise to Faulkner's level of craft by sharpening it to 21st century razorwire precision (but can a practice now almost a hundred years old be answered or even honored by late academic prose?). I think of Raffel as a disease of the contemporary literary magazine and MFA culture: this is daunting, if your purpose is to write an entire novel without nodding or even blinking. It's unfortunate the prose has no other speeds, no other levels of awareness and care. And for me, it's unfortunate that all that labor has been expended on old-fashioned scenes and ideas.
On the dustjacket Patricia Volk is quoted as saying Raffel is "one of America's freshest voices since Faulkner," and setting aside what it might mean to say that America has needed something as "fresh" as Faulkner, the identification is accurate. Raffel's prose also has echoes of McCarthy and Proulx, but it is if anything more carefully tended even than theirs. The sometimes very short chapters have been published in a range of literary magazines, and they bear the imprint of North American MFA programs. Every line wants to show evidence that it has been seriously and tirelessly pondered. Sometimes it's possible to guess at three, four, or more cliches that have been avoided in order to find the better word. Many lines have been condensed nearly to some irreducible imagist point. (The first of many acknowledgments at the beginning is to Gordon Lish.) This is from the opening page:
"The sight of her, the aunt thought: wan unironed sister in the light. The hand a fleshy visor. Useless. To have traveled like this, with the heat and with the child, in the festering light, no bags but bags, the aunt observed..." (p. 5)
The book continues with this density for a hundred pages, which seem, at the speed of reading, to be 300 or more. Some drawbacks of this sort of writing:
1. Inevitably, if every line is interrogated, there will be moments of excessive, and therefore distracting invention. For me the first was on the second page, where the unnamed aunt's sister is said to have "a bra strap dingy as unrinsed teeth." That qualifier must have been Raffel's eighth or ninth try at an adjective, and it's good. Bras are rinsed, and can have the color of dirty teeth, but the simile is so wrought that it's mainly distracting.
2. Inevitably, there will be moments of over-writing. On the same page there's this (the aunt is trying to get her sister and child on their way home):
"'Shall we?' she said. 'Shall we hasten?' she said, and her sister--a touch, a breast, a way of moving, Mama to the child, Elise her name--said yes." (p. 4)
"Elise her name" reminds me of the intentionally awkward grandiosity of the less successful stories by Proulx, McCarthy, and others. It's supposed to sound at once modernist (in its inventiveness) and pioneering or rural, or perhaps even mythic and faux-Homeric. But who talked like that, exactly?
3. This sort of abbreviated qualifying phrase, together with the aspiration to conjure some indefinite past or timeless present (with echoes, here, of Steinbeck as well as Hemingway) lends itself to poetic repetitions. These can be obtrusive. For instance "That it was not kept up is not open to question," or "The child appeared to be looking at the aunt with what appeared to the aunt to be a fever in the eyes." (p. 6) These repetitions aren't from ancient tragedy or epic: they are knowing, hyper-eloquent, MFA-quality decisions, and therefore mannerisms.
These sorts of problems might not be visible, or at least not bothersome, if the writing occasionally relaxed into other modes. But it doesn't. It seems that for Raffel--maybe as she understands Lish, Volk, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and a dozen others she thanks--really good prose needs to survive a ferocious interrogation. That is certainly often true, but it should not appear to be true in every paragraph on every page. It feels as if Raffel is fighting a doubly losing battle: to avoid every cliche (while unhappily creating new ones all along the way), and to rise to Faulkner's level of craft by sharpening it to 21st century razorwire precision (but can a practice now almost a hundred years old be answered or even honored by late academic prose?). I think of Raffel as a disease of the contemporary literary magazine and MFA culture: this is daunting, if your purpose is to write an entire novel without nodding or even blinking. It's unfortunate the prose has no other speeds, no other levels of awareness and care. And for me, it's unfortunate that all that labor has been expended on old-fashioned scenes and ideas.
September 12, 2018
Prismatic and kaleidoscopic in form, shimmering with crystalline prose—Dawn Raffel's Carrying the Body is a gem.
June 15, 2024
This was terrible. Stream of consciousness but not even in complete sentences... No idea what the point was or where it was supposed to go... super depressing as well. The best I can figure, a younger sister runs away with a man... gets pregnant becomes possibly indigent while mostly neglecting her little boy who is ill, maybe deathly ill, goes home to her hermit sister who is taking care of her dying/sick dad in a slum/hoarder house full of vermin. Then she runs away. Sister tells the three little pigs on repeat.
September 2, 2019
Intense, very abstract poetic prose. I appreciate the concept but this style of writing is not really for me. At least there was a plot of sorts.
September 1, 2025
Really unique which I did not expect having picked this up at complete random at BOOKS! on Mercer. Not mad I read it - a touch to abstract I felt I filled more gaps in than I ought to!
January 16, 2012
Wow. I've never read a book like this before. The language is so unbelievably terse and lyrical. I would swoon reading certain sections of this book, the language is so powerful. That being said, the story isn't particularly fantastic. The way it is told, breathtaking, not only at the level of sentence, but how story threads are woven throughout. It's an intricate book to be read again and again, no doubt. The only comparison I can find is Joyce, but that doesn't even quite nail it.
October 28, 2014
The language does a lot to intentionally miscommunicate here, which is an interesting conceit but at times hard to get through. Raffel has theatrical instincts - several moments of monologuing, the aunt (never named) telling and retelling the story of "The 3 Little Pigs" to the child in varying degrees of horror, the cyclical movement of looping back on the same events over and over again. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.
August 21, 2008
The body is cumbersome and drudgery.
I finished reading the book this morning and then wrote this:
An Athletic Fit
I can't say I enjoyed it, really, all of it. I am glad I read it.
I finished reading the book this morning and then wrote this:
An Athletic Fit
I can't say I enjoyed it, really, all of it. I am glad I read it.
October 25, 2014
I finished this book to learn the resolution of this bizarre story. I couldn't find one amongst all the implied, referred-to events and vague dialogue (such that there was). At least it was short.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews