"The Separation," by Katie Kitamura
My eye was caught by this book on the 'new books' shelves at the Library, and the blurbs were very praiseworthy. One Lucy Scholes, in the London Independent, wrote, "A separation is a beautifully written power-house of a novel that defies all expectations." Another critic--"...writes with piercing clarity."
And another--"What unspools is not a traditional mystery--despite the appearance of a body before too long--but a psychological meditation on the bonds and boundaries of love and marriage."
The first person narrator and Christopher, her husband, have agreed to separate. Her mother-in-law phones to tell her that Christopher, has gone to Greece and cannot be contacted: can she go to Greece to find him? Her mother-in-law does not know that the narrator and Christopher have agreed to separate. She goes to Greece, to a hotel in a remote fishing village, where Christopher has left his hotel room in a mess and disappeared.
The novel focuses on the psychological state of the narrator, with all her changing impulses, ambiguities, and instincts--her ruminations on the questions of love and marriage, her attempts to piece together what may have happened to Christopher, what his relationship might have been with an attractive woman on the staff of the hotel, and what does her driver--Stephano--know or not know about Christopher...
One reviewer compares the author to Conrad, and I can see what he meant. Recently we saw a BBC dramatization of The Secret Agent, and I downloaded it (free) from I-Books to read on my I-Pad on the elliptical trainer. And I was staggered by the extent to which Conrad was constantly and in great depth exploring the inner workings of the minds of his characters. And Katie Kitamura does indeed spend most of her time inside her narrator's head, although there are some few pages of what can only be described as digressions.
The narrator sums up as follows: "Perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in any handful of syllables, or any amount of writing."
A shortish read in a few sessions. Well worth the time.