Nine Island Pdf Summary
Gideon Cross. Falling in love with him was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It happened instantly. Completely. Irrevocably.
Marrying him was a dream come true. Staying married to him is the fight of my life. Love transforms. Ours is both a refuge from the storm and the most violent of tempests. Two damaged souls entwined as one.
We have bared our deepest, ugliest secrets to one another. Gideon is the mirror that reflects all my flaws … and all the beauty I couldn’t see. He has given me everything. Now, I must prove I can be the rock, the shelter for him that he is for me. Together, we could stand against those who work so viciously to come between us.
But our greatest battle may lie within the very vows that give us strength. Committing to love was only the beginning. Fighting for it will either set us free … or break us apart.
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Nine Island Review
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1.0 out of 5 stars A failed attempt at dreamlike wonder
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 13, 2017
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I was really looking forward to this book. It’s been glaring at me for weeks, so I finally took some time to sit down and dive in. Unfortunately, this book was not the multilayered, magical, transformative ocean I had anticipated. In short, it was a shallow pond of superfluous self-centeredness.
I was about 20% through this book on Kindle and the same figure could be used for my interest level. I still gave this a shot. I like to “escape” via memoir, creative nonfiction, or fiction and see through a new lens. This completely missed the mark.
After the first fifth, I became far more concerned about the welfare of the duck than the main character. The entire book appears to attempt to be an artistic, dreamlike creative piece, but it comes across as exhaustingly desperate literary gasp.
If you’re intersted in being trapped inside the mind of dysthymic white privilege, this is the book for you. The constant, strange objectification of bodies appeared a bit predatory and strange, which made the character difficult to relate to for the majority of this literary slog.
Catapult sure took a gamble on publishing this regrettable piece, and the result is absolutely painful. No, not painful in a heartbreaking way for unfortunate events or any torment the character may feel. The kind of pain you feel after a root canal and a delay in receiving your painkiller prescription. This wasn’t dreamlike prose, but something some pretentious bore might write while mildly stoned and craving brie.
Another bland vanilla tale to clog the channels of booklandia. Absolutely horrific.
5.0 out of 5 stars Searing meditation on love and life
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 17, 2017
Jane Alison’s Nine Island is a captivating look at love and loneliness. J, our narrator, is a middle-aged woman who retreats to a glass high-rise condo somewhere on Miami Beach, hiding under the glare of the harsh sun and pastel colors, where she can nurse some emotional wounds and take stock of her life. Should she give up on love? “I’m not old yet, but my heart is sick with old desire, and I’m back in this place of sensual music to see if it’s time to retire from love.”
J is recovering from a divorce and a string of ill-advised hook-ups with ex-boyfriends. To top it off she’s working feverishly as a translator of Ovid’s stories of metamorphoses. There’s not much that goes on in this slim novel except the character’s musings about her triumphs and mistakes in life, but it is so concentrated with searing emotional truth about the vulnerability of being alone and the pathos of love found/love lost that I can say it is one of the most riveting things I’ve read this year.
What makes Nine Island so compelling is that J is sharp in her observations of her inner and outer worlds. She turns the gaze not only on herself but also on her quirky neighbors. She’s reeling from broken relationships with men but surprisingly it’s the women she turns her gaze to. Ovid’s stories were about women—women chased, women violated, women transformed. She sees these women everywhere in her neighbors, her mother, and, yes, herself. The novel is a heady mix of fantasies and reflections of the past—failures, near-triumphs, happiness. In a twist of the spinster stereotype, we see her dealing with her elderly cat who is deaf, blind, and incontinent. It could veer into cringeworthy territory but the way J talks about that daily relationship cuts and burns without the hint of sap.
Water plays a recurrent motif throughout; it’s J’s work on Ovid seeping into the world around her: she swims almost daily at the pool. Puddles of rain, humidity, and tears abound. Often her interactions with others happen at the pool. It’s where she talks to others but also swims alone. This watery setting is a powerful backdrop that Alison wields with poetic precision without being precious or baroque. The tone of the book is one of a confession and jotted notes. Many of the chapters are just a few paragraphs long; some are achingly lyrical; others are razor sharp and funny; and a few are giddy, droll, and sexually playful. Interconnected vignettes—I was blown away by the range. Alison makes it all come together brilliantly.
The best thing about Nine Island is that it feels brutally honest and real. There is a tendency to overlook women who get to a certain age and live alone as not worthy protagonists. They become invisible, irrelevant, without a story worthy to be told. No children? No husband or partner? You might as well retire from life and give up. But J says ‘screw that.’ Her life is full of spark and wit and self-awareness, and she’s far from giving up.
[Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher for an honest and candid review. This review was originally written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.]
VINE VOICE
4.0 out of 5 stars Heartfelt and humorous….
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2017
Just finished reading “Nine Island” by Jane Alison. I want to firstly thank Jane Alison and Catapult Publishing for a print copy I won on Goodreads.com. Secondly, this is not usually a genre I would normally read, but that being said…I was quite surprised how much I enjoyed this read. It was beautifully written, humorous, touching and heartfelt. A very poetic and introspective prose.
Synopsis (from cover): Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach’s lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a month long reunion with an old flame, “Sir Gold,” and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid’s magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. “A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years,” she thinks.
When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings-on among her faded-glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that “if you retire from love . . . then you retire from life.”
About Jane Alison Author Of Nine Island pdf Book
Jane Alison Author Of Nine Island pdf Book was born in Canberra, Australia, and grew up in the Australian and U.S. foreign services. She attended public schools in Washington, D.C., and earned a B.A. in classics from Princeton University. Before writing fiction, she worked as an administrator for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a production artist for the Washington City Paper, as an editor for the Miami New Times, and as a proposal and speechwriter for Tulane University. She also worked as a freelance editor and illustrator before attending Columbia University to study creative writing.
Her first novel, “The Love-Artist,” was published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has been translated into seven languages. It was followed by “The Marriage of the Sea,” a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Her novel, “Natives and Exotics,” appeared in 2005 and was one of that summer’s recommended readings by Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio. Her short fiction and critical writing have recently appeared in Seed; Five Points; Postscript: Essays on Film and the Humanities; and The Germanic Review. She has also written several biographies for children and co-edited with Harold Bloom a critical series on women writers. She has taught writing and literature at Columbia, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, and for writers groups in Geneva, Switzerland.
Jane Alison’s most recent book, “Nine Island,” is an autobiographical novel forthcoming from Catapult in Sept. 2016.
She is currently Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Nine Island pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Catapult; First Edition (September 13, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 244 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1936787121
- ISBN-13 : 978-1936787128
- Item Weight : 11.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.6 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,904,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,339 in Women’s Divorce Fiction
- #1,419 in Humorous American Literature
- #2,078 in Sisters Fiction
- Customer Reviews: 3.8 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
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