Synopses & Reviews
From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed,
New York Times bestselling
A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, “lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny” (Tom Perrotta, author of
The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan’s swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather, and the unease of twenty-first-century life.
Marie and Simone, friends for decades, were once immigrants to the city, survivors of World War II in Europe. Now widows living alone in Chelsea, they remain robust, engaged, and adventurous, even as the vistas from their past interrupt their present. Helen is an art historian who takes a painting class with Marie and Simone. Sid Morris, their instructor, presides over a dusty studio in a tenement slated for condo conversion; he awakes the interest of both Simone and Marie. Elizabeth is Marie’s upstairs tenant, a woman convinced that others have a secret way of being, a confidence and certainty she lacks. She is increasingly unmoored—baffled by her teenage son, her husband, and the roles she is meant to play.
In a chorus of voices, Kate Walbert, a “wickedly smart, gorgeous writer” (The New York Times Book Review), explores the growing disconnect between the world of action her characters inhabit and the longings, desires, and doubts they experience. Interweaving long narrative footnotes, Walbert paints portraits of marriage, of friendship, and of love in its many facets, always limning the inner life, the place of deepest yearning and anxiety. The Sunken Cathedral is a stunningly beautiful, profoundly wise novel about the way we live now.
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Praise for A Short History of Women
"Wickedly smart . . . A gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art."
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"Ambitious and impressive . . . Reminiscent of a host of innovative writers from Virginia Woolf to Muriel Spark to Pat Barker . . . A witty and assured testament to the women’s movement and women writers, obscure and renowned.”
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"A subtle and profound book, as thought-provoking as it is moving."
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"What a marvelous book: one part Transit of Venus, one part Stone Diaries, one part incomparable. Actually, that's not true: she write like a female Ian McEwan."-
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Praise for The Sunken Cathedral
“The Sunken Cathedral is a gem of a novel—lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny. Kate Walbert has somehow managed to write an elegy for a Manhattan that still exists, and characters who—like most of us—would prefer not to think about their impending doom.”
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“Kate Walbert’s frightening, timely novel follows an achingly particular cast, small flames unexpectedly doused, so that the prevailing uncertainty of what it is to be alive rises like the waters flooding coasts. The insufficiencies of sheltering-in against Sudden Weather turn Who We Are Stories into Who Are We plaints, yet Walbert is wise and funny and compassionate, and she gifts The Sunken Cathedral with birds and strokes of blue. ‘Much to learn from blue,’ a painter considers, and much to learn from this ambitiously made, great fiction.”
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“The Sunken Cathedral is impressionistic, a bookof drifting shadows and blazing clarity; Kate Walbert has written a gorgeousand moving requiem for a people and a city that are not yet lost. Amagnificent achievement.”
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“Hypnotic…though the novel seems to be set in the present,it feels more menacing than our current world, with sudden, dangerous stormsand terrorism drills in school. An unconventional and unsettling novel withvivid imagery and passages of pure poetry.”
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“Kate Walbert's TheSunken Cathedral paintsan elegant picture of a LowerManhattan neighborhood and its citizens, at risk from both ‘suddenweather’ and relentless gentrification.”
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“A brief book with limitless depth, TheSunken Cathedral usesfootnotes to move between past and present, thought and action. Set in New YorkCity, most of the voices are female, starting with two 80-ish widows whoventure out to take an art class.
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“Walbert tunes in toa complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a cityrecently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth...The tapestry ofvoices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use offootnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the presentto the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories…TheSunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussythat itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from thesea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyricalimagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious,elegiac and occasionally even funny, TheSunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught ina time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we livenow.”
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“[A] shimmering newnovel…At its heart is a wonderful pair of widowed French-born friendswho both survived World War II, married Americans, and raised their onlychildren together…Walbert has beenrightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability ofwomen's lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn…In TheSunken Cathedral, she again creates multiple narrative strands whicheventually dovetail as satisfyingly as tightly fitted joints on awell-constructed rocking chair. But then she takes her remarkable technical prowess to a newlevel with long footnotes…This literal subtext forms a secondary narrativeline that cleverly reflects the way attention is so often fragmented…abeautiful tribute to a city that's continually in flux.”
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“Kate Walbert’s fourth novel, The Sunken Cathedral, makes a music that is dissonant, haunting, vibrant, moving and wise. It may be her best work yet, and may spark youto go find all her prior books… Walbert packs everything into [a] series ofbraided narratives: deliciously human, memorable characters; the sensuousphysical world (‘a collection of wet smells, furtive cigarettes, coffee’); atart omniscience (though points of view alternate) shepherding a brisk pace.Best, she infuses The Sunken Cathedral(an apt, eerie image) with a sense of time’s relentlessness (figuring often asthreatening weather): how it pools and eddies, drowns or sweeps away what oncemattered — and how we respond to our arbitrary placement in it… Time isdeepened in these pages by commentaries or expansions in the form of longfootnotes — a form I’ve rarely liked elsewhere but which works powerfully here…Walbert’s past oeuvre has notably examined — in a spiky, oblique prose style —the predicaments of women. She accomplishes that here again brilliantly, butthis time her style allows easier entry, and her scope widens… Sharp, richly imagined, The Sunken Cathedral serves — like much of Walbert’s work —as a lovely manifesto: Attention must be paid.”
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“Walbert is a writerwith the power to alter your view of the world and of what constitutes story…The Sunken Cathedral is an experience, afriend, an intellectual companion, a jewel with many facets…a collection ofobservations and impressions, a carefully curated collection of words that theauthor has polished to a brilliant shine.”
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“Kate Walbert not only sees vanishing women — a pair ofwidows in their 80s, the suddenly uncertain mother of a teenage son, amiddle-aged art historian with visions of a drowning city — but paints theirlives in indelibly rich and vibrant colors in her stunning new novel, The Sunken Cathedral… Walbert conjures [the] past as she embodiesthe present, in shimmeringly lovely prose embedded with jewellike details.Marie's story becomes, in essence, a love story, although the heartbreaking endof one: She is the sole survivor of a happy marriage. Walbert capturesperfectly Marie's precise sense of loss.”
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“[Walbert] gives us prose that is poetic, luscious, and utterly exquisite, while remaining both accessibleand elusive. She also litters her story with footnotes…these tidbits addextra color to an already brilliantly vibrant mosaic…I haven't read a book thisbeautifully written since Ondaatje's The English Patient…I cannot recommend it more highly.”
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“In The SunkenCathedral, Kate Walbert renders an impressionistic portrayal of animperiled New York, whose residents live with the threat of weather surges andterrorism in a city that is at once mythical and real…[a] brilliant allegory… fascinating characters and theirbackstories propel the novel from serenity to angst, as each character preparesfor the coming deluge.”
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“[Walbert’s] compelling characters achieve highs ofself-knowledge and certainty about their place in the world - and also sinkinto depths of depression, regret, and worry about the future…Walbert's work isa win-win. It is both wise andbeautifully written.”
About the Author
Kate Walbert is the author of the novels A Short History of Women, chosen one of the ten best books of 2009 by TheNew York Times Book Review and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, nominated for the National Book Award; The Gardens of Kyoto, a Book Sense top ten and winner of the Connecticut Book Award; and the New York Times notable story collection, Where She Went. Walbert’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Public Space, Ploughshares, and the O. Henry Awards, and have twice been included in The Best American Short Stories. Her novels have been included in the best books of the year by TheNew York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, Library Journal, Slate and others, as well as translated into many languages. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and in 2011 was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her plays have had readings at Playwrights Horizons, the Roundabout Theatre, and New York Stage and Film. Her play, Genius, will premier at Profiles Theatre in Chicago in 2015, and she is currently working on a dramatic adaptation of A Short History of Women. For many years, Walbert taught fiction writing at Yale University.