The Old West also takes center stage in Téa Obreht’s masterful fourth novel ... The result is pure fun. Who hasn’t wanted to breach the roped-off areas of a house museum, peek into the boudoirs and rifle through the drawers to find the sexier story hiding behind the scene? Obreht does that here, letting her imagination run wild ... weaves together three distinct timelines with three sets of characters, and delightfully mashes up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga ... Obreht is at the top of her game in Sunrise, offering a moody, suspense-driven plot, sharply drawn characters and succulent prose.
Obreht flexes her skills as a literary writer who deploys a thriller’s pacing, the vivid description crucial for realistic historical fiction, and the steady, calm voice of a central narrator, our entry point into a multifaceted tale of abuse and generational trauma ... Obreht is a writer who doesn’t rush into easy patterns of storytelling but seizes control from the jump ... What may feel like a puzzle in these pages is in many ways an accordion. Obreht allows the stories of both the past and the present to speak for themselves as connections surface throughout the course of the book ... Obreht distinguishes herself as a spellbinding writer who recognizes the ways that mythologies bend the truth to dazzle us with stories that capture a larger history. Sunrise is a blistering look at the mythologies we just can’t shake.
Téa Obreht’s novels teem with conflicting narratives, treacherous landscapes and speculative fictions ... Obreht’s portrayal of Colin Yard – his gradual, desperate slide from favoured son to villain of the piece – is a brilliant piece of theatre ... Throughout all three of her interwoven timelines, Obreht raises similarly searching questions about courage and cowardice, idealism and pragmatism, and most of all about how history is recounted and who gets to own it ... The novel does have its flaws. While the eventual revelations about Nina’s relationship with the ghastly Ben feel devastatingly real, it is difficult to ignore the loopholes in logic that characterize Nina’s portions of the narrative...None of this detracts from the fact that Sunrise is an engrossing, original and thought-provoking novel, effortlessly readable and beautifully told. Given that most of what we come to know about Vargas is itself a series of fictions, it perhaps makes better sense to frame Nina’s miraculous survival as similarly mythic.
To reach the air of hauntedness and mystery that pervade most of the narratives, we need to sink through regions of ordinary consciousness first. When Sunrise gets cooking it works on tackling the deepest themes of human existence: love, death, and the way the past—even a hundred years before—haunts the present. Of love and death, death has the stronger presence. In Sunrise, love, when it appears, is usually defeated or decayed ... This is not Henry David Thoreau’s pleasant transcendentalist nature, but rather that obscure force emerging from the woods, ever producing and ever consuming itself. Sunrise, rightfully, is not here to provide answers. It is here, in part, to meditate on the forest and the mysterious, mentally obscure residents of the natural world, the speechless animals ... Sunrise is excellent and recommended. It explores some of the deepest questions of our lives, meditates on some of the great mysteries, and tells three gripping stories along the way. What more can we ask for?
Few literary devices are more rewarding than a successful novel-within-a-novel, but pulling it off ain’t easy ... It all mostly comes together in the end, but the various plots fall prey to a tendency to artificially withhold information in favor of narrative twists, and the book itself is ultimately subsumed by Obreht’s desire to comment on the current state of the world, specifically the current state of men ... Nina eventually reappears, but the tenor of part two of her story is drastically different from her introduction, again because it feels as if Obreht just didn’t want to reveal Nina’s true motivations so as to be able to pull the rug out from under readers.
Obreht is riveting in each time frame as she exults in emulating and subverting tales of the Old West while exposing the poisonous complexities of gender, taboo love, myth, history, and our desecration of the wild in a breathtaking, shocking, and reverberating survival story.
Electrifying ... This revisionist Western has real teeth and first-rate plotting. Descriptions feel viscerally real, and at first, it may seem to emphasize atmosphere and character over story, but pay close attention—and keep going. In a puzzle-novel like this, when connections between different facets take time to materialize, one hopes the payoff will be worth it. Is it ever! The finale surpasses all expectations in this powerful, unique novel that asks why some stories are celebrated while others remain hidden.
[Obreht] masters the challenge of bringing different times and places to life . . . one of the most unusual, thought-provoking books you’ll read this year.
With effortlessly elegant style, the author of The Tiger's Wife has created an intricate but accessible story blending an account of wilderness survival with an intriguing tale from the 19th-century West that navigates the sometimes indistinct borderline between fact and myth ... Obreht's most impressive achievement is that, unlike many novels employing a framing structure, each of this story's elements feels equally captivating ... Obreht delivers all of this in prose that succeeds in propelling all three of these plots forward while frequently turning a phrase that encourages one to linger ... Sunrise succeeds exceptionally well in triggering the 'vivid and continuous dream' that the late novelist and teacher John Gardner argued was the goal of the best fiction. Its characters are well drawn, and whether they're acting in the contemporary Old West or its historic version, Obreht makes their struggles both plausible and engaging. Anyone entering this richly imagined world will feel a tinge of regret when the time comes to leave it.
Obreht has created quite a challenge for herself here, and she delivers a virtuoso performance. In her hands, these three narratives aren’t just satisfying on their own. They illuminate each other in ways that are both elegant and emotionally deep. An adventurous, rewarding novel from a writer who just gets better and better.
