![]() ![]() The contents of a mysterious box left in her keeping, a series of encounters with shady (when not positively demonic) reality instructors and accomplices, and her (probably correct) inference that Martin had been investigating art forgeries all lead her to Budapest and Munich, among other locales-and to the inconclusive conclusion that the machinations of “a wicked man who would do anything to turn the world of art on its ear” have exposed her to the influences of people who reach from beyond the grave to set old wrongs right and exact vengeance. ![]() On a train to Vienna, Helen meets the grotesque, menacing Rosa Kovslosky and almost immediately deduces that the older woman is somehow enacting a succubus-like exchange of body parts with her (while blandly reassuring the dumbfounded Helen that “We all lose parts of ourselves from time to time”). The protagonist and narrator, Helen Martin, is an art historian who specializes in “medical illustration” and who suffers harrowing physical and emotional dislocations while traveling across Europe in search, at first, of her errant husband Martin Evans, a freelance journalist who’s scarcely part of her life anymore. Obvious echoes of Kafka and subtler whiffs of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling resound throughout this tantalizing metaphysical mystery, the second illustrated novel from the Canadian artist, photographer, and author of The Tattooed Map (1995).
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