Sarah Dunant's Mapping the Edge explores the best of two worlds, offering readers a suspenseful, eerie plot and a delicately nuanced exploration of the kinds of prickly, challenging ideas that, sadly, usually lie outside the province of the traditional thriller.
When Anna decides to take an impromptu trip to Italy, she packs her bag, leaves her 6-year-old daughter, Lily, at home with close friends, and steps onto the plane. She's always been a woman of action, and her personal and professional lives have been filled to overflowing recently. So her friends Paul and Estella think nothing of the jaunt--it's a well-deserved break, a weekend for psychic refreshment, a brief step outside reality.
But a disappearance? When Anna fails to return, Paul and Estella make excuses, to themselves and to Lily. When the weekend stretches toward a week, the possibility of her permanent absence becomes hauntingly real. Dunant takes that absence and weaves together a pair of possible "explanations," playing out alternating scenarios of seduction (Anna in the throes of a disturbingly passionate, illicit affair) and abduction (Anna in the grasp of a stranger whose cordiality turns gradually to madness).
The narratives are both twinned and twinning, less separate alternative accounts than a dialogue, with moments, objects, and phrases that serve as uncanny mirrors between the two. Dunant is indeed a skilled mapmaker--her novel maps the edge of the self, its boundaries that so often go unquestioned. Anna's sojourn in Italy is an excavation of the threat of being defined by one's relationship to others and the temptation to redefine oneself beyond the restrictions of conventional expectation, no matter how seductive, how forceful, that convention. --Kelly Flynn
i thoroughly enjoyed this book. character, dialogue, suspence- perfect. i loved the concept that either of the anna scenarios might be happening and her loved ones had no way to know. i was ok with the ambiguity of never knowing which was the truth because that seemed to be the point of the story: when people disappear, there are no answers. i expected the character to die and for her loved ones to have no way to piece the story together. but what happens in the last paragraph was so bizarre. who was the man? what does he signify? what is the point of the horse being splintered in the same place in both stories if she doesn't return with it both times? it was so well written- this was such a let down.
writes,
What a strange story for a writer to concoct who has done a brilliant job at historical fiction. My best book of 2006 - "In the Company of the Courtesan" - prompted me to read "Mapping the Edge". I was so impressed with both "Birth of Venus" and "Courtesan" that I gave the books to a number of friends for Christmas......but dear me what a disappointment reading Dunant's attempt at contemporary suspense - if you could call it suspense. I understand what she was trying to do - with the parallel Anna plots, I think? - I still don't understand the last scene in the book with the fellow taking off with a package from the telephone bank? Was the wooden horse intended for Lily, the package? Did it contain or was it another precious art work that her paramour was trying to get out of Florence or perhaps Samuel and the Italian lunatic were in cahoots? Hey, anything's possible in this novel....Dear me, what a confusing plot.....what a disapointment - Sarah stick with your best genre - Historical Fiction - I look forward to your next HF novel. jrl
writes,
This is a very strange book. I read it in one afternoon - not because it was rivating but more to not have to prolong the agony. The idea of slipping between the character's 'home' and the 'away' part where we see what the character is going through, is a fine idea. However, we have two 'away' parts and at first I thought we had to chose which we liked best (neither).
First book I've read by Ms. Dunant and it most likely will be the last.
