Dept. of Speculation Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

Dept of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy trust faith knowledge and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all

Jenny Offills heroine referred to in these pages as simply the wife once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept of Speculation their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship As they confront an array of common catastrophesa colicky baby a faltering marriage stalled ambitionsthe wife analyzes her predicament invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts She muses on the consuming capacious experience of maternal love and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art

With cool precision in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed Exceptionally lean and compact Dept of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page