The Rabbit’s Foot by Sigrid Nunez

 

Illustration by Damien Cuypers

The Rabbit’s Foot

by Sigrid Nunez

HE WAS A DUKE, or an earl—he was some sort of nobility—and not the first of his kind to visit the hotel. Royalty, rock stars, movie stars, rich and famous people from all over the world came to stay there. Some had become familiar faces, returning each time they happened to be in New York. Couples who’d spent their wedding nights at the hotel booked the same room for their anniversaries, and there was a family that got together every Christmas and requested that a tree and decorations for hanging be waiting in their suite when they arrived. As for the English lord, he’d been there once already, a year ago, then as now by himself. It was not uncommon for a guest to sign the register using a false name. Last time, he’d been the Count of Monty Python. This time, he was Lord Sauron.

Sigrid Nunez by Kimiko Hahn

 

Sigrid Nunez. Photo by China Jorrin. Courtesy of HarperCollins. ©1994 China Jorrin. 

Sigrid Nunez by Kimiko Hahn

Sigrid Nunez and Kimiko Hahn reflect upon Nunez’s novel A Feather on the Breath of God, discussing the concepts of woman as storyteller, and writing as crochet.

JANUARY 1, 1995

Describing Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God is akin to describing a poem: ultimately unsatisfactory. The novel is “about” the narrator’s relationships to her parents and later, a lover—but without a conventional structure, the novel’s real relationships are more abstract. It is as if the author had taken her story, much of it autobiographical, and wrote in-between the lines. This is what we read. We come to understand something about a father who cannot speak his children’s language and bestow his Chinese Panamanian heritage, a mother who is driven to learn the language in order to tell her stories about the fall of Nazi Germany, and the narrator who, in observing life in Brooklyn projects and Manhattan ballet classes, has no choice but to become the storyteller. Then of course there is the Russian taxi driver who learns English in order to woo the storyteller. However, in the end, the primary relationship is less with people than with expression, or more literally, with the English language. A delicate and sinewy novel.

Sigrid Nunez’s flawless recipe for literary excellence: Throw in a parrot

Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, “The Vulnerables,” tackles aging, literary precarity, the generation gap and the problem of a surprising macaw. 

(Marion Ettlinger)

Sigrid Nunez’s flawless recipe for literary excellence: Throw in a parrot

By Lynn Steger Strong

Nov. 15, 2023 8 AM PT

The Vulnerables

By Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead: 256 pages, $

Talking to Sigrid Nunez, much like reading Sigrid Nunez, is deeply pleasurable, immediately intimate. There is warmth but also urgency, and very little artifice. When I ask her a too-vague question about how time feels essential to her fiction, she answers simply, “Well, it just is. I would never be able to explain it.”

Fiction to look out for in 2014

Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson

Fiction to look out for in 2024

The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special

Alex Preston
Monday 1 January 2024

There’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer’s debut fiction feature next month.