Tuck inhabits the spacious realm of the imagination, shifting time zones and historic periods effortlessly, weaving memories and photographs, family stories and facts, as Liliane's mesmerizing portrait emerges.
Other writers before Tuck, notably Orhan Pamuk in The Museum of Innocence, have mapped out a similar autobiographical route to imaginative fiction, but with more feeling and to far greater effect, proving that the old lesson to writers, 'Show, don’t tell,' is one still worth taking to heart.
Tuck enlivens her narrative by regularly breaking off and changing tack, using tangents, flashbacks, fast-forwards, and stories within stories to give us a fuller, more complex but also more interesting picture.
Tuck simultaneously creates a layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through and questions the possibility of definitively capturing or summing up human lives. It’s a high-wire act that she doesn’t always manage successfully, but is nonetheless exciting in its sweep, ambition, and conceptual intricacy.
