Labrador

by Kathryn Davis

A New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, Kathryn Davis's "dazzling first novel" (Kirkus Reviews) "transforms a literary commonplace -- a young girl's transition from childhood to adulthood -- into a brilliantly original story" (Belles Lettres). In LABRADOR, Davis conjures two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the elder, is beautiful and wayward. Kitty, the younger, is a loner whose only means of escaping the bewitching influence of her sister is to follow her grandfather to his home in Labrador, where she cannot avoid confronting the demons that haunt her.
A tale of two sisters and the ambiguous, sometimes destructive ties that bind them, LABRADOR is a tender meditation on love, its joys, its limitations, and its hidden bitterness.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, 20th Century

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.

Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.

Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

shes so good i could swear she was canadian...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of two very different sisters and their possibly well-meaning but nonetheless ineffective parents. The younger sister is dreamy and naive. The older sister is more worldly and sharp with her tongue; she seems untouchable until suddenly she doesn't. The sisters are very close yet still very far apart in certain respects. As they grow older, this tension becomes more complicated. Davis's style tends toward the baroque with a fabulist flourish. Her characters are well drawn and believable. The dialogue is realistic. A lot happens without being fully explained, which is always good. A very impressive first novel.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is that rare thing, where I am captivated by it, desperately working my way to the end so I know every nuance, every line, every deep, dark secret. And yet, I also resist finishing it because it means that I am no longer reading it. The first read can never be revisited. I must stretch and contract the process simultaneously, watching as my internal pendulum swings.

Enchanting, disturbing, LABRADOR is everything that makes Davis so belovedly, blastedly annoying: her unworldly writerly skills are in full effect here. She is just so, so good.

[Arielle Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathryn Davis really is THAT good. This book is somehow at once very dense and a twisted, imaginative page-turner. There are action sequences and fairytales and angels and bear sex and achingly gorgeous sentences. Pure magic.

[abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“but the only part of me capable of motion was my heart, red and polished as the plane, tiny and blunt-nosed, its attempts at flight constantly thwarted, as if there was nothing inside my body so vast as a soul” (180)

[Michael Jantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. A magical book.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit overwritten, but very unique and captivating

[Fen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long heard Kathryn Davis' name mentioned alongside authors I love, including Leonora Carrington and Helen Oyeyemi, so I approached Labrador with high expectations. Alas, while it's a good book, it did not quite do it for me. It certainly has the shifting narrative, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, that characterizes the genre of slipstream. But for me it's missing something.

Davis' writing style in Labrador feels cold and clinical. That's my main problem with it. Most of the book is narrated by younger sister Kitty, telling the story retroactively to her older sister, Willie. Kitty's narrative voice is bland, and most of the characters are little more than archetypes. It's not unpleasant to read, but it doesn't have any sort of engrossing atmosphere, either. It has certain moments that stand out as chilling or uncanny, such as the fairy tales that appear several times throughout. The rest is of the time, it plods along.

I like books where I have no idea what's happening, if they succeed in creating a certain mood which compels me to keep reading. Some books communicate more in emotions, atmosphere, or symbolism, than in plot, and will never "make sense" in the conventional manner. In fact, when done well, those are my favorite books. This book didn't succeed in capturing my attention that way. It features the primary, realistic narrative about the two sisters, which is rather conventional and flat, and then the secondary, fantastical narrative, which may or may not be real, but which clearly reflects the primary narrative in some way. Figuring out how the narratives reflect one another is the challenge of the book, and probably requires a reread to best connect the dots, but the problem is I don't like it enough to reread it.

From one read, my interpretation is that Kitty continued to believe in fantasy, long past the age of most children, to cope with the disturbing aspects of growing up. "Rogni" particularly helped her understand Willie's relationship with Peter, an adult sexual predator. It's clear by the end Willie has not believed in fantasy in some time, which finally brings Kitty to reality, with "Rogni's" help. Whether the fantasy creatures ever really existed at all is beside the point.

[Joe Bruno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not as bright as I pretend to be. This is an interesting journey this book. I recognize the depth, and it is littered with references I almost know enough to recognize, but I fear a good amount of what was included in the book went past me. Still, I can say I enjoyed it quite a bit.

This is the debut novel that Kathryn Davis wrote. If I have the dates correct she was past 40 when it came out. That helps explain the depth, this has levels a young writer just can't get at. I tend to prefer my literature to be a little more conforming, straightforward. This has elements that from within the story fall outside of any sort of objective reality. It is quite thought provoking and I am certain I did not understand everything Davis was trying to put across. Good stuff though.

I found this at the Goodwill a couple of years ago. For a writer or a literary fiction reader this is a good book to read. This won't probably appeal to all but it is a strong work. Davis knows what she is doing.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once long ago . . .
In the beginning . . .
There was once . . .

We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

It is the story that owns and directs us.
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

It’s all here in this coming-of-age fable that laps at the shores of this or that bit of ancient lore and laps up the magic milk out of the priceless saucer, too.

Brilliant brilliant brilliant.

[Chloe Mello · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't plan to do much review writing here but this book is everything to me. I return to it whenever I'm struggling to read frequently, or at all, or need something more. It's so utterly enchanting. The detachment, distance, colors, temperature, texture. Every time I think about it I want to cry with overwhelmed feeling. It can be incredibly difficult to get at exactly why it clicks with me. I absolutely understand that it can be a little hard to get through the distance for some readers. But almost every line struck my chest. Masterful work.

[Grace Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still the best still my favorite

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange and mysterious story, told inside a girl's head, a younger sister in a dysfunctional and isolated family, as she grows from baby to adolescent. Everything is filtered through her perceptions.

What are these visions, these voices, these creatures, these myths?

Everything revolves around her older sister, whose love both smothers and rejects.

What finally breaks the tension, releases the demons? Are they really gone, along with the magical parallel world? Is the death of both ancestry and possibility, the rupture at the joining of the circle, enough to free them all, to really change the orientation and currents of their existence?

And how will this become known?

[Trina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for the gorgeous, startling, double-take writing, but (and I assume I'm not alone) to understand what the bleep is going on requires multiple readings or a plodding, lots-of-notes-in-the-margins single read. Not a non-stop flight to entertainment land. Lots of layovers and turbulence, but the view is astonishing.

[Daniel Polansky]

A young girl's relationship with her brilliant, eccentric sister, their drunken, depressed parents, and an angel who may or may not exist. I've read quite a lot of entries in the 'female coming of age/magical realism' sub-genre but this really stands out. Davis had a fabulous turn of phrase and a fascinatingly odd mind, there are some genuinely original movements in here. Good stuff.

[Mia Valdes · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a younger sister who had a tumultuous relationship with their older sister, this book struck a particular chord with me. I had to take breaks between chapters as it stirred up childhood memories and had me drawing parallels between my own experiences and those of the characters. Odd experience, relatable read, biased connection.

[Daniel Schulof · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy Kathryn Davis as much as anyone, but this lacks many of the charms of her later stuff. Overwritten and showy, but also technically problematic. Not very funny, not very interesting. Mostly just finished it out of a sense of duty and respect.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous writing. Beautiful integration of the everyday world with the magical world. Exact understanding of the yearning and confusion of a young person.

[Virginia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written, engaging characters, totally exhausting to read.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creepy little story of sisters, an angel (?), and the confusion of growing up.

[Perrin Ireland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably perfect

[keallelogram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting narrative structure and sick sidebar stories by an imaginary angel

[alyssa carver · Rating 5 out of 5]

well, i can't say that i understand the book i just read, but i enjoyed the reading of it so thoroughly that i slowed down as i got near the end so i could savor it, and i immediately re-read entire sections of it when i was done, AND found that whenever i lost my place reading on the train i took as much pleasure in reading random sentences out of order as i did reading them in their proper order. the writing is that good. the language! delicious and sensual and urgent and strange, while utterly uncontrived.

i have been a huge kathryn davis fan since "the thin place" and i am slowly working my way though all of her novels. this one was her first, and so far my only other favorite out of the four i've read (thin place, hell, the walking tour, labrador.) very different from the later work in that it is centered around a single first-person voice and point-of-view. she does shift from this pov at times, like the entirely fairytale-esque middle section, but for the most part we remain in the consciousness of the narrator. i think this allows for some intimacy with the story and the character that can be missing from the other novels. i very much admire kathryn davis's experimentation with form and structure, but the end result can be disorienting (walking tour) or alienating (hell).

in this novel, the diversions end up making sense to me as a component or construct of the consciousness of the narrator. it remains centered, at least in a kind of emotion, even when i don't understand what the hell it all means. as i said, i'm not sure i even understand all of what happened, or is set to happen at the novel's end, but i BELIEVE it. i was totally engaged, and look forward to reading the book again and teasing out more meaning from all the allegorical(-seeming?) miniature sub-stories. what is readily apparent here is that this is a unique psychological portrait of a uniquely intelligent, passionate adolescent girl whose coming-of-age is performed as an act of storytelling and mythmaking. beautiful, beautiful, unflinching observations of family and of the natural world, full of love and terror.

i think the more i say about it, the less sense it makes.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lyrical novel about a girl in New Hampshire and her family, especially her older sister whom she adores. It's sort of a love letter to her sister, and it has an angel and a missing grandfather and a man-eating polar bear, and other various magical elements. Sentence by sentence is is quite extraordinary, but it has no interest in narrative causality, and too much of the novel (I think intentionally) makes no sense, either rational or magical.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only experience with Davis being the delightfully bizarre Duplex, I was initially disappointed that the story resolved into a somewhat straightforward narrative about two sisters. However, I found it to be an accurate portrayal of the torture of being a younger sister. I can't wait to see what my little sister thinks of the book.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memorable for what happened to Grandpa when he went out to greet the polar bears!

[Patricia]

Poetic coldness.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up out of a box of books left outside on Fire Island. It's simply amazing.

[Sholeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

almost like poetry. I love the blur between magic and reality

[Susan]

Spec Coll: PS3554 .A934924 L3 1990 Also listed for stacks but no call number!