Book Review: Sightings by SusanTrott

This book which I fished out of a bargain bin in a nondescript bookshop in Paranaque I consider the find of the decade. Ms.Susan Trott’s inventiveness and insouciance has made me an aficionado. It is a sad fact that she is not well known. Her book deserves a larger readership.

Sightings

by Susan Trott

Sunny, the heroine of this unusual novel is a quirky, flaxen haired girl who happens to find her spy lover, Masefield in the streets of Paris. Her father, Muir Scott, decides to disappear from the limelight of the literati where he has reigned for sometime. Friend to none other than Ernest Hemingway, Muir runs away with Sunny’s childhood friend Chris, which starts the complex situation that our heroine finds herself in. To top it all, Sunny is now in a quandary, whether to choose Masefield, the man she just met a week ago and loves forever, or Buster, the man she has known forever but only loves as a good friend.

Trott crosses the boundary from reality to fantasy, and takes the reader into a surreal journey. She uses first person subjective for all characters effectively that in each chapter, the character is revealed by his/her perspective and choice of words. It is refreshing that each time the reader can peek into a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings in a slow satisfying way.

The real test that I have for a book’s immortality is not only how many people read it but also how one can go back to these pages, perhaps to linger over a few lines, to mull over the meanings of each experience.

I can safely say that this is a book which I can read a few times more, just to taste the saltiness of each page and remember the feel of the wind on my face.



The story begins with the image of a woman sailing a long, slender, silver bay, her mystical blue eyes sweeping the waters over and over for the body of her small son who drowned fifteen years ago…



Quotes:
Maybe it is when you are feeling intensely alive that you are most intensely aware of death.

Masefield: All my life I have been looking for a superior human, a person who possesses intelligence, strength, and soul to a high degree. Naively, I even had a list of names of people to seek out because I thought they might fit the bill.

I was surprised because he( Buster) turned out to be such a human human, which was something I somehow hadn’t expected.