LEADER 03687cam a2200421 i 4500001 249895 005 20240621225859.0 008 150924t20162016nyu 000 1 eng 010 2015035393 020 9780385353960 |qhardcover 020 0385353960 |qhardcover 020 |z9780385353977 |qelectronic book 035 (OCoLC)ocn926623370 035 249895 042 pcc 043 n-us-ny 049 LHMA 040 DLC |beng |erda |cDLC |dYDX |dTOH |dYDXCP |dBTCTA |dBDX |dOCLCF |dGO6 |dORX |dCDX |dOCL |dPUL |dZCU |dOCLCO |dLHM 050 00 PS3569.P56 |bU57 2016 100 1 Spivack, Kathleen, |eauthor. 245 10 Unspeakable things / |cKathleen Spivack. 250 First edition. 264 1 New York : |bAlfred A. Knopf, |c2016. 264 4 |c©2016 300 viii, 290 pages ; |c22 cm 336 text |btxt |2rdacontent 337 unmediated |bn |2rdamedia 338 volume |bnc |2rdacarrier 520 "A strange, haunting, exhilarating debut novel about survival and love in all its forms: about sexual awakenings and dark secrets, about European refugee intellectuals who've fled Hitler's armies with dreams intact and who have come to an elusive new (American) "can-do, will-do" world they cannot seem to find. A novel steeped in surreal storytelling and beautiful music that transports its half-broken souls--and us--to another realm of the senses. From the much-admired, award-winning poet, author of Flying Inland and With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others. The setting: New York, the early 1940s, with the spectre of a red-hot Europe at war. At the center of Kathleen Spivack's Unspeakable Things: Anna (known as the Rat), an exotic Hungarian countess with the face of an angel, beautiful eyes and a seraphic smile, with a passionate intelligence, an exquisite ugliness, and the power to enchant ... her second cousin Herbert, a former minor Austrian civil servant who believes in Esperanto and the international rights of man, a wheeler-dealer in New York, powerful in the social sphere, yet under the thumb of his wife, Adeline ... Michael, their missing homosexual son ... Felix, a German pediatrician who dabbles in genetic engineering ... the Tolstoi String Quartet, four men and their instruments, who for twenty years lived as one, playing the great concert halls of Europe, for whom music is their life; escaping to New York from Bremerhaven, smuggled out on a German submarine, their money sewn into the red silk linings of their instrument cases ... And watching them all, Herbert's eight-year-old granddaughter, Maria, witnessing the family's strange comings and goings, being regaled at night when most are asleep with the intoxicating, thrilling stories of their secret pasts ... of lives lived in St. Petersburg ... of husbands being sent to the front and large, dangerous debts owed to the tsar of imperial Russia, and of a strange pact made in desperation between the Rat and the mystic faith healer Grigori Rasputin, their meeting night after night in Rasputin's apartments, and the spell-binding, unspeakable things done there in the name of penance and pleasure.."-- |cProvided by publisher. 591 Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024 650 0 World War, 1939-1945 |xRefugees |zNew York (State) |zNew York |vFiction. 650 0 World War, 1939-1945 |xSocial aspects |vFiction. 650 7 FICTION |xLiterary. |2bisacsh 650 7 FICTION |xHistorical. |2bisacsh 650 7 FICTION |xCultural Heritage. |2bisacsh 648 7 1939 - 1945 |2fast 655 7 Fiction. |2lcgft 852 0 |bstacks |hPS3569.P56 |iU57 2016