FICTION Heartsease Kate Kruimink, Picador, $16.99 In her latest novel, Kate Kruimink offers a heartrending tale that hinges on the relationship between two sisters, Nelly and Lot. The story takes the connection between these two women, as well as their deceased mother, to dramatic and even supernatural heights, in ghostly visitations and mind-reading that at times sits oddly with the book’s realist preoccupations but nonetheless makes it an absorbing read.
The story takes place at a silent retreat: “The desk, the sofas, the paintings and the weird carpets were all like artefacts locked behind a cordon in a well-preserved homestead museum, the kind that skates over the various atrocities of the local area in favour of bone-white dummies posed stiffly in replica period clothing and ranks of staring dolls in the old nursery ...
I was yet to be invigorated by this experience.” Nelly waits for her sister to arrive and characteristically, we soon realise, drops acid to dull the unceasing depression that has plagued her since childhood and is now coupled with addiction. She wavers somewhere between the living and the dead, visited regularly by the ghost of her mother as she hallucinates.
By the time her older sister Lot arrives at the retreat, late (as usual) and somehow perfect (as usual) we understand the sarcastic and depressed Nelly has always held the world at a distance and feels she cannot measure up to the example of Lot, who she believes her mother loved more. Nelly j.
