Figes, Eva - Joyce Carol Oates

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Eva Figes's luminous prose poem of a novel, "Light," like her earlier "Waking," is clearly descended from [Virginia] Woolf's great experimental novels. Technique is all or nearly all in this fastidiously wrought narrative of a day in the life of Claude Monet in the summer of 1900. The reader is a witness to a remarkable variety of modulations of light—sunlight—beginning in the darkness preceding dawn and ending in night….

"Light" is a stronger, more vivid and far more interesting work of fiction than "Waking," which presented seven mornings in the life of an extraordinarily self-absorbed woman, whose musings on her experience as daughter, wife, lover, mother and elderly dying woman are resolutely impersonal, as if the species and not an individual were speaking. "Waking" was, in fact, very much about light, sunlight and darkness and a human being's all but unconscious passage through it. (p. 11)

While "Light" does not tell a...

[The entire page is 449 words long]

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