About Uncle

Rebecca Gisler

Paperback

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Yes!

A freaky tale of isolation and the porous membranes between us, Rebecca Gisler's slim novel renders a collapsing world with equal parts aversion, fascination, and tenderness--for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sayaka Murata.

At an age when she'd rather be making her own way in the world, an unnamed young woman finds herself moving to a small town at the seaside to care for her uncle. He's a disabled war veteran with questionable habits, prone to drinking, gorging, and hoarding--not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time. When the world starts to shut down, Uncle and his niece become closer than ever. She knows his every move--every bathroom break he takes, every pill he swallows--and finds herself relying more and more on this strange man, her only company in a shrinking world. But then Uncle's health takes a turn for the worse: He's sent to a hospital that cares for cats, dogs, and Uncles, and any way for her to make sense of this eerie new reality, and her place within it, falls apart.

Poet-novelist Rebecca Gisler's debut novel, set against our increasingly disjointed world, welcomes readers into a home of shut-ins as cozy as it is claustrophobic. Gisler's bright, winding prose, masterfully translated from French by Jordan Stump, offers a rare witness to the complex ways in which we order our lives, for better or worse, inside and out.

Book Details

Publisher: Two Lines Press
Publish Date: Feb 20th, 2024
Pages: 148
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.00in - 4.50in - 0.60in - 0.30lb
EAN: 9781949641554
Categories: • World Literature - France - 21st Century• Family Life - General• Literary

About the Author

Gisler, Rebecca: - Rebecca Gisler, born in Zurich in 1991, is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute and of the Master's degree in Création littéraire at the University of Paris 8. She writes in German and French and translates her texts from one language into another. She has published poetry and prose in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is the co-organizer of the series Teppich in the House of Literature Zürich. In 2020 Rebecca Gisler won the 28th Open Mike literature competition.

Stump, Jordan: - Jordan Stump is one of the leading translators of innovative French literature. The recipient of numerous honors and prizes, he has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Eric Chevillard, as well as Jules Verne's French-language novel The Mysterious Island. His translation of NDiaye's All My Friends was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

Praise for this book

"A cumulative portrait of a family is drawn with dark humor and inexhaustible affection...Through a series of digressions that seem to pull from Beckett, Kafka, and entomology, the narrator recounts the life of her mother's brother, passing from a delightfully grotesque focus on his body ("I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet") to an expansive and deeply empathetic vision of his past."

--Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"A dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics....Gisler writes with a breathless quality, as if the narrator ran into her room to write this novel before the world collapsed, as if pulling these memories from her psyche against time so as not to lose them."

--Asymptote

"No other writer has captured the singular beauty of the northern French coast like Rebecca Gisler in her debut novel... [Uncle] is vivid and contradictory, his depths obscured, his horizon distant."
--Charlie Connelly, New European

"About Uncle delivers emotional weight with a smile...[it] successfully blends a quirky comedy with an undertow of sadness."

--John Self, The Critic

"Swiss author Gisler's first novel...depict[s] the delicate dance between a peculiar man and the young adults who are forced to handle him. . . . Gisler asks if we can ever really know the people in our families. Perhaps acceptance doesn't require understanding--when Uncle gets in the mud, we pull up our pants legs and join him."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Gisler fills each page with breathless and winding sentences that infectiously convey the narrator's exasperation with Uncle, who acts as a deliciously disgusting foil, spitting when he eats, peeing in bottles, and forever shuffling around the house in dirty sweatpants. It's a cockeyed yet authentic depiction of the relentlessness of family obligations."
--Publishers Weekly

"Wry and funny and rich in strange new forms of discomfort, About Uncle is a slim volume that cuts deep, revealing the soft ligaments of family relations and letting them gleam under the light." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

"Disquieting, tender, painfully precise, the language of Gisler is a language of embodiment. To read Uncle is to become him." --Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

"A monstrous little novel for a monstrous little man...An uncle like a screwed-up ogre, someone we'd prefer to avoid as much as we'd like to protect him from a world that wasn't made for him. In a hundred pages cracked to let the light through, Rebecca Gisler delivers a tasty and strangely sweet ode to the wobbly and fragile." --Dominique Fidel, Simple Things