PDF Ebook Asymmetry: A Novel, by Lisa Halliday
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Asymmetry: A Novel, by Lisa Halliday
PDF Ebook Asymmetry: A Novel, by Lisa Halliday
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Review
WINNER OF A 2017 WHITING AWARD // NATIONAL BESTSELLER Praise for Asymmetry “Asymmetry is extraordinary, and the timing of its publication seems almost like a feat of civics. . . .Halliday’s prose is so strange and startingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. . . . It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. . . . Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” —Alice Gregory, The New York Times Book Review "Masterly...As you uncover the points of congruence, so too do you uncover Halliday’s beautiful argument about the pleasure and obligations of fiction...It feels as if the issues she has raised — both explicitly and with the book’s canny structure — have sown seeds that fiction will harvest for years to come." —"The New Vanguard," The New York Times Book Review "Exquisite...For us, the ride is in surrendering to falling down rabbit holes to unknown places. The moment “Asymmetry” reaches its perfect ending, it’s all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again." —The Washington Post “A scorchingly intelligent first novel. . . a clever comedy of manners set in Manhattan as well as a slowly unspooling tragedy about an Iraqi-American family, which poses deep questions about free will, fate and freedom, the all-powerful accident of one’s birth and how life is alchemized into fiction. . . . [Asymmetry] will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses.” —Parul Seghal, The New York Times "A brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "It’s hard to deny, by the novel’s end, that Alice/Halliday has pulled off this stunt of transcendence. As with a gymnast who’s just stuck a perfect routine, your impulse is to ask her, what’s next?" —Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine "Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair–a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage . . . Alice and Amar may be naive, but Halliday is knowing–about isolation, dissatisfaction and the pain of being human." —Time Magazine "Asymmetry is a debut burnished to a maximum shine by technical prowess, but it offers readers more than just a clever structure: a familiar world gone familiarly mad." —The New Republic "In its subtle and sophisticated fable of literary ambition, and the forms it can take for a young woman writer, Asymmetry is a “masterpiece” in the original sense of the word—a piece of work that an apprentice produces to show that she has mastered her trade. . . . Much more rarely do we hear this story from the young woman’s point of view. What’s so powerful and interesting about Asymmetry is that Halliday does not exactly undo that silencing; rather, she enacts it, and then explodes it." —The Atlantic "An interesting meditation on creativity, empathy, and the anxiety of influence. . . Asymmetry is a guidebook to being bigger than ourselves." —NPR "Lisa Halliday’s striking debut is certainly – as the title implies – a sharp examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women, innocence and experience, fame and aspiration. . . . asking a dizzying number of questions, many to thrilling effect. That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success." —The Guardian (UK) "In her stunning debut novel, Lisa Halliday places three storylines in close proximity, leading to fascinating contrasts. After reading only a few sentences of her intelligent prose (and that dialogue!), you’ll be itching for her next novel, whenever it should come." —Refinery29 "A beautiful debut novel . . . Halliday deftly and subtly intersects the two disparate stories, resulting in a deep rumination on the relation of art to life and death." —Booklist (starred review) "It's not only Halliday's ingenious structure but her urgent depictions of post-9/11 anger and Islamophobia that makes Asymmetry such a vital read." —INTERVIEW (Spring Preview) “Two seemingly unrelated novellas form one delicately joined whole in this observant debut....A singularly conceived graft of one narrative upon another; what grows out of these conjoined stories is a beautiful reflection of life and art.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Deftly combining two stories that are distinctive in style and content, Whiting Award-winner Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry is a stellar piece of writing and a bold debut." —Shelf Awareness “Lisa Halliday’s debut novel starts like a story you’ve heard, only to become a book unlike any you’ve read. The initial mystery is how its pieces fit together; the lasting one is how she pulled the whole thing off. Deft, funny, and humane, Asymmetry is a profoundly necessary political novel about the place for art in an unjust world.” —Chad Harbach, author of The Art Of Fielding “Wow. Asymmetry is a rare book in the sense that it is always shocking to read something this good and polished and fully formed, a novel that impossibly seems to be everything at once: transgressive and intimate and expansive, torn from today’s headlines, signifier of the strange moment we now occupy. Somehow this book, this author has all but exploded into the world, fully formed. Lisa Halliday is an amazing writer. Just open this thing, start at the beginning.” —Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver “Amazing. Ms. Halliday has a unique ability to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. I’m struggling to think of a novel that has had a similar effect on me. Asymmetry is funny, sad, deeply humane, and clearly the product of bold intelligence at work.” —Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds "Asymmetry is a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy. Lisa Halliday writes with tender laugh-aloud wit, but under her formidable, reckoning gaze a world of compelling characters emerges. She steps onto the literary stage with the energy of a debut novelist and the confidence of a mature writer." —Louise Erdrich, author of LaRose and Future Home of the Living God "Lisa Halliday’s singular and beautifully-written novel is impossible to put down, and to pin down. It shifts before our eyes from the tale of a literary-world, May-December love affair to the first-person account of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow Airport. She treats these characters with such integrity and respect they seem corporeal. Nothing, we realize, is as it seems, and it’s deeply affecting to discover not only how Halliday’s narratives resolve but how they connect to one another. She has written a bold, elegant examination of the dynamics of love, power, ambition, and the ways we try to find our place in the world, whether at 25 or 75. Her crisply crafted sentences exude the inviting quiet of an assured artist – all this while posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself." —The Whiting Foundation
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About the Author
Lisa Halliday grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction. Asymmetry is her first novel.
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Product details
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (October 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781501166785
ISBN-13: 978-1501166785
ASIN: 1501166786
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.3 out of 5 stars
236 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#2,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I read this book quickly, and greedily, and yet, now that I am finished with it I find that I understood perhaps very little of it and will have to go back and read it again. This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book. I loved it. The writing is superb: elegant, graceful, understated and deeply connected. And there is so much sly humor that I found myself laughing out loud, particularly in the second half, in what could be described as the "dark" half. And yet, because the two separate story lines that form the book are indeed "asymmetrical" it's challenging to assign meaning to this narrative without a closer look. To me, that is the mark of a truly good book, one that has you immediately turning to page one as soon as you've finish the last word, eager to re-enter the world of the novel with a different perspective. Like life, Halliday has created an experience that is multi layered, mysterious, and complicated. And like life, I need to ponder it,and explore it, to fully understand its meaning. I highly recommend this book, if nothing else, for the brain tease it will provide you.
Encouraged by its being one of NYT 100 notable books and several of the blurbs I waded into this, intrigued by the characters in the first twenty pages or so, I kept going with increasing boredom and frustration with the tedious dialogue and lack of character development. It is rare that I don't finish a book. I couldn't justify continuing with this one.
This book, which is essentially a study of the imbalance of power in relationships, was brilliant…but boring. Philosophical…but perplexing. Intriguing…but incongruous.Written by Lisa Halliday, it is actually three novellas, the first two of which have nothing in common and the third of which is a somewhat lame attempt to unite the first two.The first story, "Folly," is a May-December romance between Alice and Ezra that some critics say is a roman a clef about Halliday's own affair with Philip Roth with lots of allusions to "Alice in Wonderland." The second story, "Madness," is about Amar, a young American man of Iraqi heritage, who is detained for several days at Heathrow Airport based (presumably) on ethnic profiling. The story flashes back and forth between the airport nightmare and his life story until then. The third story is a radio interview with Ezra, and in the answer to one of the many questions he is asked, he unites the first two stories. Sort of."Asymmetry" is high-brow literary fiction at its snobbiest and most pretentious, and I was totally underwhelmed.
A thinking book. Beautiful prose hooks the reader in the first chapter then ends abruptly with a seemingly unrelated story about a detention in Heathrow airport. Still well-written- it's hard to get invested in characters that appear strung together. The last chapter lost both me and the additional stars. I grew to hate the pompous writer. It wasn't until a discussion group that I got the full intention of the author. The only way I can describe this book is passive-aggressive. I would have enjoyed the full story of the December-May, Eliza Doolittle romance rather than the suggestion through three unrelated short-stories. This is the time when the idea of show- don't tell may get lost in translation. Either way- it was thoughtfully and precisely written.
The first section is a brilliant expose of an asymmetrical relationship. Halliday captured a famous aging author and her time with him in a riveting and well written piece. The second section Madness was her own work to make her mentor's point ... write what you know in great detail. She did a great job of failing to follow his advice, but it was too tedious for the reader to endure. Two dimensional characters in a story which she had no connection with, a never - ending boring tale. The third section, the interview was a throw-away and insulting. The first and third parts of the book also seemed to be a listing of famous works of authors and composers for no particular integral reason. It did not serve to connect us to Ezra. If you have to work this hard to analyze a novel to get through its layers it will disappoint. It did.
I find it hard to understand what all the hype is about. There are clues throughout the book that the reader can pick up to sort-of string the narratives together, but overall the book is a stylishly written mess.
I enjoyed the first and third parts, but found the second part to be lacking (the airport scenes were great, but the Iraq locations lost me). Somehow I understood the connection between the parts without having read any interviews or reviews first, but that wasn't common among my friends and I highly recommend some research in advance of reading it (others were confused and lost interest and missed context, all of which can be avoided by reading about the connection ahead of time). The book is very much written by and for a high brow literary crowd rather than the mass consumer (I actually found it was trying too hard with the references and clever tricks).
I read this book almost nonstop, pausing only to sleep and take care of work obligations. Otherwise, i read it while eating meals, while waiting for the next conference seminar to begin, every spare moment. It's possible that a sliver of that could be attributed to a bewildered reel at the death of Philip Roth (who was oblique inspiration for a character in here). But i think the majority of it was the twisty, complex, convoluted Rube Goldberg machine of its structure and interwoven themes.
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