![]() The use of the hands is a powerful medicine, he would say.”Īnd while she is unable to reconcile her relationships with her father and son, in creating and constructing the labyrinth she draws people to her: Lexie, who wants to leave the trappings of the hamlet to start a life in the city Ray, a brooding miser trapped in his own torment and Jurko, an illegal immigrant running from the memory of an unhappy childhood.Įach are lured to the project for their own reasons, although Lohrey avoids the sentimentality of allowing their shared goal to spring unlikely (and unbelievable) friendships. She frequently returns to the echo of her father, who “believed in the mind as a divine engineering project designed for the invention and use of tools. Erica reflects on her relationship with her father, and her experience of motherhood – both unsettling – and while neither strand reaches a finite resolution, there is a peace in the physical act of construction. As the story itself follows the winding paths of memory, the act of conceiving of and building the labyrinth grounds Erica, and the narrative, in the present. The structure of the labyrinth also provides definition to the narrative, which might otherwise find itself lost in memories of the past. The remote setting allows their lives to intersect and overlap in the way that busier cities often don’t. Garra Nulla, a hamlet with only a hundred or so dwellings and no shop, pub, or anything that might mark it as a town, fosters the intimacies and connections between characters who might otherwise be left to the periphery. The novel captures these acts of surrender, as the labyrinth weaves its way around the lives of everyone nearby. Effortlessly you come back to where you started, somehow changed by the act of surrender. In the maze you grapple with the challenge but in the labyrinth you let go. The maze is a challenge to the brain (how smart are you), the labyrinth to the heart (will you surrender). To call them lost would be a misstep though: Although Erica’s story is at the core of the novel, she is surrounded by people who are equally unsettled. The characters who wander the pages are searching for meaning beyond the various trappings of their lives. Her latest is ideal for the meandering uncertainties of 2020.
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