![]() The thing was long enough that you could talk on the phone while rooting through the refrigerator, all the way across the room, in search of a peach. It went once around her body and five times around her arm. Louisa twisted herself in the cord of the old black wall phone. It gives the reader a roadmap to follow as the story unfolds. The first sentence, and then the initial paragraph, does so much work for the story as a whole. ![]() In “The Station,” we know, right from the first sentence, that Gaffney is not writing a contemporary story: “Louisa twisted herself in the cord of the old black wall phone.” What a marvelous image this is! In addition to alerting us that the time is not contemporary, Gaffney is also introducing us to the character of Louisa. While careful research is evident in her work, it never overshadows her investigation into the human condition. ![]() ![]() ![]() Part of the pleasure that’s derived from her work is the way that she implicitly creates parallels with the world in which we live today. Her first two novels- Metropolis and When the World Was Young-are set in the early and mid-twentieth century. Elizabeth Gaffney often writes historical fiction, stories that open up past times in new ways. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |