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Title: The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett ISBN: 0-15-600621-9 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (65 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A deceivingly simple story works its magic
Comment: The first thing you notice when reading The Magician's Assistant is that Ann Patchett really cares for her characters. She quietly nurtures them, even the minor ones, and offers the reader a gentle yet revealing view of their complex lives.
At the opening of the novel, Parsifal the magician, has suddenly died and Sabine, his assistant of twenty years and recently his wife, is trying to cope with her loss. Their relationship had always been a unique one - Sabine loved him and dedicated her life to him despite his inability to love her in the same way: he was gay. What complicates her grief is the discovery that Parsifal has family living in Nebraska - a mother and two sisters - family he had always told her died many years earlier in an accident. In fact, everything she knows about the history of his life, turns out to be a fabricated story. As Sabine struggles to comprehend the reasons for Parisfal's deceptions, she embarks on an emotional journey, traveling to Nebraska to try and connect with the Parsifal she never knew through the family she never knew he had.
Patchett effectively uses two elements throughout the book that bind this story together: the dream world and the world of magic. Descriptions of Sabine's dreams, where she reunites with Parsifal as well as his gay lover Phan, are used to relate Sabine's emotional awakenings as she forms relationships with Parsifal's family and learns of his early life; the magic that Parsifal and Sabine performed throughout their union serves as the tool that brings Parsifal's family an understanding of the son/brother they lost years ago.
Lovingly written and gracefully rendered, The Magician's Assistant is a deceivingly simple book and a very rewarding experience.
Rating: 4
Summary: Spellbinding, full of surprises, dreams
Comment: Once in a while, I find myself so mesmerized by a book that I buy it in bulk to give to friends. Ann Patchett¹s The Magician¹s Assistant is one such read, an enchanting story that left me spellbound. It is a tale about appearance verses reality, a tale full of surprises crafted by Patchett¹s own sleight of hand. As the story begins, Parsifal the magician is dead. Sabine, his wife of five months, is in shock. She knew he would die but not from the aneurysm which occurred a few hours earlier. Sabine has loved Parsifal for 22 years, from the moment she laid down her waitress¹s tray and volunteered to assist with his magic act. Now, Parsifal¹s life has come to an abrupt halt, and we read and grieve with Sabine over her tremendous loss.Nine days after Parsifal¹s death, Sabine¹s phone rings. It is their lawyer. Parsifal, she is told, has left part of his estate to his mother and two sisters. Mother and two sisters? Parsifal told Sabine that he had no family, that there had been an accident years ago, and all were dead. Sabine, never given any details, had created her own version of the car crash that killed his entire family. ³Sabine made them out of bits of Parsifal¹s personality, characteristics of his face. She made their skin from the pale color of his skin. She put them together in her spare time, and when she had it exactly right, she arranged them in the car and sent them speeding towards their death.² With the lawyer¹s call, Sabine realizes her total belief in Parsifal has been an illusion, like the magic she helped him perform. Mother and sister arrive in California to meet Sabine, their only link to Parsifal¹s past. Shortly after their visit, Sabine sees that she now has ³eighteen untouched years... early, forgotten volumes of her favorite work. A childhood that could be mined month by month. Parsifal would not get older, but what about younger?²Sabine travels from sunny California to Alliance, Nebraska, birthplace of Parsifal born Guy Fetters. Alliance, where Sabine sees flat land and snow and ³streets lined in rows of tiny, identical ranch houses.² It is quite a contrast to Los Angeles with ³the scent of flowers and citrus that as recently as May had settled on her clothes and in her hair like a fine dust,² Sabine wonders as she drives through Alliance if it¹s the snow that makes every house look the same or ³was there something else under that white blanket?² Indeed there is and as the past unfolds, so do the lives of the Fetter family. By the time Sabine returns to California, the healing has begun, a healing that comes from her new founded knowledge of the man she loved, a man she thought she knew. There is another character in the novel by the name of Phan, a Vietnamese refuge who is dead, but plays a critical role in the relationship between Sabine and Parsifal. Sabine has a number of dreams about Phan, and it is through these dreams that she comes to accept death. Phan acts as her spiritual guide and Patchett¹s descriptions of this journey are wonderful. Her writing is so believable that I forgot I was reading about dreams. I wanted Sabine¹s illusions to be real.The Magician¹s Assistant can be read on many levels. Sabine and Parsival, the names themselves suggest a relationship between the ancient myths of the courageous Sabine women who stopped their fathers and husbands from killing each other, and Parsifal, who causes the Holy Grail to assume its consecrational powers. But this is a book review and not a dissertation. I know you¹ll enjoy The Magician¹s Assistant. As the author explains, magic is less about surprise than it is control. ³You lead them in one direction and then come up from behind their backs. They watch you, at every turn they will be suspicious, but you give them decoys. People long to be amazed, even as they fight it. Once you amaze them, you own them.² Patchett¹s performance certainly amazed me. Like I said at the start, I now own a lot of copies of this book
Rating: 4
Summary: The Sweetness of Intimacy Lost: A Book Review of The Magicia
Comment: The Sweetness of Intimacy Lost: A Book Review of The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett, Harcourt Brace & Company, paperback p. 356.
This tale opens as Parsifal, the magician, dies. We are told of his previous day of an intense headache, and the short, claustrophobic stay in the MRI chamber. Parsifal's death by stroke was unexpected; he was preparing for an impending death due to AIDS-related complications, as did his love Phan, six months prior. At his death, he is accompanied by his wife, Sabine, his Magician's Assistant of 22 years and his wife of 6 months. Parsifal married her so that she would be taken care of following his death. Thus we enter an intriguing, unusual love story.
The shock of the death doesn't seem to dissipate throughout the book. The impact is compounded by Parsifal's previous life which comes to light upon his death. He had lied about his past.
This was a lovely story which unfolded beautifully, and is best unrecounted here; a gradual, descent into love lost and all the intimacy which goes with it awaits you, the reader.
Excellent use of dream sequences are skillfully used to bring Sabine to a place of resolution with Phan's life and death as well as her best friend and beloved Parsifal's death. Both Phan and Parsifal visit Sabine in her dream state; they are the beloved, the guides, the friends, the family, and they lend a voice of sanity to the situation she enters in Nebraska.
We go back in time to the 1960's, childhood, move forward to LA 1990's settings including an appearance on the Johnny Carson show, which is replayed nightly, in the home of Parsifal's family of origin, in Nebraska. The 1990's also hold memories of magical performances, the parties, the gay and glamorous LA life, the marriage party, the selection of the burial triad plot for Phan, Parsifal and Sabine, the anchoring goodness of Sabine's mother and father and pet Rabbit. All lend humanness to this bittersweet tale of unconventional love, remorse, forgiveness and letting go. The resulting relationship Sabine develops with Parsifal's family, is believable, with bouts confusion interspersed with bursts of clarity and well-written dialogue. " I don't care how you worked out being married. What I care about is that you knew him, you were there with him. You were with him all those years when I wasn't. You were with him when he died." Kitty stopped and considered this. "Were you?" she said, "right there with him?"
The ending stays true to form, leaving the reader with the sense of life might go on, or might just slide back. It leaves the hopeful room to hope and room for the despairing to despair..
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