Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins-vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisve, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisve must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives-and their shared dream of freedom.A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged.
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I say I’m writing about time and water, and people open their eyes and ears and say, “Wow, what do you mean?” And I say, “In the next one hundred years, the elements of water on the planet are changing.” So the glaciers are going down. The sea level is going up. The pH, the ocean acid level, is reaching a level that we haven’t seen for fifty million years. This is happening in a single person’s lifetime.
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
It may just be that the subterranean places we, the fugitives of the present order, must now run to will not be dug out by the hard excavatory machinery of adult logic or the noble spiritualities that claim to know the way but by the gentle seeking fingers of our children caressing the soil, tickling the ground until it guffaws wide open.
We dreamed we were hers.
The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces.
When the ship
I was asked to jump into that dark.
Like plunging into the ocean’s deep.
Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts.
She had arrived, in pieces of herself.
Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the “embryo lighthouse,” as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations.
