Summary
The Effect Of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits. Virago, (pounds) 12.99 New York resident Heidi Julavits finished the first draft of her second novel before September 11, 2001. It's interesting to speculate how much the Twin Towers attack and the subsequent war on terror influenced the finished item. Certainly her topics - plane hijacking and fumbling counter-intelligence - feel very much of the moment. But The Effect Of Living Backwards, which takes both its title and the name of its heroine from Alice Through The Looking Glass, is not so concerned with world politics, which it views as essentially irrelevant and unknowable, as it is with sibling rivalry.
Alice and her sister Edith are flying to Morocco, where Edith is to be married. That doesn't stop her propositioning both a member of the cabin crew and a blind man en route. The blind man turns out to be a hijacker with a very strange agenda, and Alice soon finds herself acting as interpreter, playing surreal psychological games with her captors and bitching with her sister.See the full content of this document
Extract
New Fiction
Julavits's plotting is improbable, confusing and wonderfully entertaining, and her dialogue is as naturalistic and spark-filled as an electric circuit. "You have a file. Everyone has a file," explains one hijack ...
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