The Disobedience of Water: Stories and Novellas » (Reprint)

Novelist Sena Jeter Naslund reimagines historical characters and events so vivdly, readers often mistake her fiction for fact. With her imaginative mastery of "suspension of disbelief," Naslund weaves a tapestry of history's highlights into compelling fiction for her fans.

Evoking passion and heartbreak., intelligence and unapologetic humanity, these eight beautifully crafted stories explore the boundary conditions between the self and others. Although social realities — racial and ethnic tensions, sexual harassment, and abuse — make up their background, these are really love stories in which people discover and forgive one another. A daughter finds her father's kindness extends beyond her and their family; a wife discovers and forgives the affair between her husband and best friend; and, in the title story which takes the form of a letter to an almost-lover, the narrator winds through swirling eddies of memory and language to relate her present and past lives and the loves that have informed them.

Written with a masterful sureness of hand and heart, these captivating, intimate stories display Sena Jeter Naslund's extraordinary presence as one of today's most rewarding writers of fiction.

Publishers Weekly

The eight lyrical stories and novellas in this collection should buoy Naslund's reputation, already riding high for her 1994 novel Sherlock in Love, even higher. Plot matters less to Naslund than voice, sympathy, setting and tone: hospitable readers will be won over right off by "Madame Charpentier and Her Children," which describes a woman beginning anew after a friend's suicide: "It was autumn and we had already gone back to teaching, but the grip of the university was still loose and the feeling of summer cradled us." In "The Shape You're In," a 25-year-old artist flees Atlanta and her disturbed ex-lover to what she hopes will be a new life in Montana. Sarah discovers, however, that her Southern habits have followed her west: "Like many Southerners, she knows there is a kind of protection in politeness. It has a kind of beauty of its own, too." The title story draws its power from an unconsummated love affair whose memory hangs as powerfully as any unconsummated relationship over the narrator, a single mother. She concludes, "I will know one thing about the heart--that it can break endlessly." Almost every entry here finds fluidity and confidence in its prose. In Naslund's tightly observed worlds, quiet betrayals resonate long after their occasions have faded.