The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - Tapa dura

Críticas

"[Vendela Vida's] finest book...With its echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith, this novel is full of darting pleasures."--New York Times

"A brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being... Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida's astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again."--Booklist (starred review)

"Vendela Vida's work is utterly compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written. Reading her inspires me, and reminds me of how powerful the novel can be - how addictive and vital - and of how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as her comes along."--George Saunders

"Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It's also insanely funny.)"--Lena Dunham

"You will tear through Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, this wry, edgy, philosophical thriller, this love child of Albert Camus and Patricia Highsmith, this sly satire of Hollywood, this entertaining journey through the vast desert of identity and regret."--Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

"The novel packs a wallop, taking the themes of Camus and Kierkegaard and transplanting them into a story with the pace and intrigue of a page-turner... A speedy and suspenseful fish-out-of-water tale with a slyly philosophical bent."--Kirkus

"The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is both a travel cautionary tale and a fantasy about the infinite possibility that travel offers."--NPR's Fresh Air

"A chilling tale about the gradual loss of identity-a novel of doubles, invisibility and lies, poised somewhere between a fever-dream and a suspenseful thriller . . .Vendela Vida perfectly captures what it feels like to be unreal, especially to oneself, and grasping at roles in order to survive."--Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

"This new volume is compelling in its underlying mystery and its call for readers to explore their individual pasts and the opportunities they can take in pursuit of a fulfilling future. It's never too late, the novel suggests, to begin anew. Vida's prose is spare and suspenseful, moving the reader quickly toward the denouement. It's a novel ripe for the summer season-a book you can read on your porch or at the beach, leaving your old self, like the diver's clothes, behind."--Seattle Times

"Vida's prose is spare and suspenseful, moving the reader quickly toward the denouement. It's a novel ripe for the summer season-a book you can read on your porch or at the beach, leaving your old self, like the diver's clothes, behind."--Electric Literature

Reseña del editor

From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.

In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities—she knows she’ll never recover her possessions. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.

A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she’s inhabiting the actress’s skin off set, too—going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving further and further away from the person she once was.

Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.