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The Blessings of Haunts |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Maude McDaniel |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2002 |
| Size: 1,687 Words, 9,869 Characters |
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EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE
Margot Livesey
New York: Henry Holt, 2001
232 pp., $23.00
Are ghosts always unhappy? The question is asked but never really answered in Eva Moves the Furniture, an evocative story that teeters provocatively between the real and the phantom worlds. When Eva asks the priest, he can remember no happy ghosts. "The reasons the dead are restless," he says, "what drives them back to walk among the living, are usually sorrow and pain. If there are happy ghosts, they must be few and far between."
The experiences of Eva, narrator of this clumsily named novel, tend to suggest otherwise. (The name of the book, with its slapstick resonance, is the only awkward thing about it. One imagines a meeting of editors and author desperate to come up with something that reflects the uniqueness of the story, the poltergeisterie--my word--of it all. After someone brainstorms "Eva Moves the Furniture," everybody breathes a sigh of unjustified relief.)
In the ...
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...niture stands head and shoulders over Livesey's other books, pragmatic in its luminous acceptance of life beyond our own, yet by no means dispelling the mystery. Sometimes chilling, sometimes cheering, this story fulfills its author's intentions and then some, dealing with characters who are sympathetic, in fact, downright likable, whose faults are surely, after all, sometimes in their stars.
(1,014 of 9,869 characters)
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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