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    Mislaid
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    Mislaid
    Unavailable
    Mislaid
    Audiobook7 hours

    Mislaid

    Written by Nell Zink

    Narrated by Laurence Bouvard

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.’ Jonathan Franzen

    Virginia, 1966. The motionless deeps of the lake outside Stillwater College are being ruffled. Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, is determinedly fondling Peggy, an ingénue freshman with literary pretensions, in his canoe. So begins a long affair but the two are mismatched from the start.

    The story that follows rocks the boat in every sense. Nell Zink’s hugely entertaining, totally unique Mislaid explodes the nuclear family and topples every foundation of identity – black and white, gay and straight, “normal” and very very strange…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 18, 2015
    ISBN9780008100582
    Unavailable
    Mislaid
    Author

    Nell Zink

    Nell Zink was born in 1964 in southern California and grew up in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she majored in philosophy. Rather late in life she got a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen, Germany. She works as a translator for Zeitenspiegel Reportagen and lives in Bad Belzig, south of Berlin.

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    Reviews for Mislaid

    3.5/5

    121 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very funny, very silly. Fast paced, jokey, weird, perverted. I loved it!
    • 3/5
      Oh dear, an American novel that should have been written and screened on TV in the 70’s so we could laugh at the hairdos and flared trousers. Sorry to be so unfair but it did read in that 70’s unreal, pastiched, stereotyped, cliched manner. Sorry again.
    • 1/5
      TW: sexual assault, pedophilia

      This holds the distinction of being the worst novel I have the memory of reading. In all honesty, I skimmed a large amount of story starting around 40% through. Filled with repugnant characters, a severe misunderstanding of race relations, an insultingly absurd premise, homophobia, misogyny, casual pedophilia, and just plain poor writing, every reading session of this book felt like a particularly cruel form of Inquisitional torture. The scenes of the main character, whose name I can't remember, composing plays that spell out how she feels about relationships all too clearly, and then were even more clearly spelled out by the author literally telling me what they meant, had me rolling my eyes and wondering how something like this gets published. The scene in which her decision not to shoot a black man in cold blood is meant to convince us innocent readers that our protagonist had completely assimilated into black culture was when I put my head in my hands and thought deeply about what I was doing. The scene were the gay poetry professor casually fantasizes about sexually assaulting and murdering a bizarre straw-woman for feminism and Maoism was the icing on the cake. I would not recommend this horrible reading experience to anyone.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what to think of this book. It was interesting enough to keep my attention, but the character's circumstances were a bit whacky at times.
    • 3/5
      While in college, Peggy, a lesbian falls for one of the teachers, Lee, who just happens to be gay. During their affair, Peggy becomes pregnant and they become married. After years of misery, Peggy decides to run away taking her 3 year old daughter and leaving behind her 9 year old son. Afraid Lee will have her committed; Peggy devises a plan to hide from the world by adopting an African American identity for her and her daughter. With clever writing this book explores themes such as gender, race, and sexuality. I found myself enjoying the majority of this book but found myself skimming through the last part.
    • 4/5
      I found it quite bizarre in the beginning. Having purchased it because it was billed as being hilariously funny, I was immensely disappointed to not even crack a smile for about 60% of the book. But the last 40% caught me. I still heard no laughter, but I did enjoy it. I'm also glad I read it, which is worth a star by itdself.
    • 5/5
      I had just read about this on Charlotte's thread, and then I went to the library and what should be staring out at me from the new editions shelf?! Serendipity, I cried, as I snagged it. And what a lovely find it was! I read it in just two sittings. It is irreverent and witty, and I thought finally an American fairy tale that encompasses all of the bizarre, inconsistent and incongruous voices of a country whose doctrine declares equality for everyone but has yet to deliver its promise. It reminded me of those old screwball comedies (think Cary Grant) that had the clever dialogue and the plot that was always spinning slightly out of control, only without the censors to say, "Wait a minute, you can't do that. You can't say that." Completely and totally engaging, it will pull you into its pages and not release you until you have read every last word. Highly recommended."Because people never grow accustomed to lies. They either believe them or they don't. And a big lie is never forgiven. The person who told the lie stops existing, and in his place stands a paradox: the truthful liar. The person you know for sure would lie to you, because he's done it before and confessed. You never, ever believe that person again."
    • 4/5
      I loved the quirky wittiness of this book and the way gender, race, and legal lines were stretched and blurred. Anyone who has contemplated running away from prescribed roles, even if it is only in one's head, will find something in this book.
    • 3/5
      If Mislaid sounds a little off its rocker, that’s because it is. And it’s meant to be. It’s witty and funny and pointed and smart in ways many books never dare to be. Unfortunately, that pointed wittiness only works about 50% of the time. The rest of the novel feels less like a novel and more like a collection of scribbled drafts or tributaries Zink started to navigate before realizing they led nowhere—it just doesn’t add up.