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    Spilling Clarence
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    Spilling Clarence
    Unavailable
    Spilling Clarence
    Ebook283 pages6 hours

    Spilling Clarence

    By Anne Ursu

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Wonderfully original....This whimsical, bittersweet debut suggests that the stories of our lives are what save us."
    --Us Weekly, Best of the Week

    "Slowly, charmingly, painfully, Spilling Clarence unfolds dimensions of how our pasts and presents intermingle, how our dreams and memories feed off one another. No scalpel can touch the truths Ursu locates.... [This novel flows] as naturally as a mountain rapid, splashing you enough to drive home the certainty that there's much more to come - insights that make sense, issues and instincts real enough to demand that you stay alert.... When Harris Jones reopens its plant, officials assure one and all that the deletrium spill will have 'no permanent effects.' You can't say the same about Spilling Clarence, which lingers."
    --The Philadelphia Inquirer

    "Anne Ursu's writing is effervescent. She manages to fill her sentences with so much light and life that every page in Spilling Clarence is a dazzling event."
    --Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnne Ursu
    Release dateSep 6, 2011
    ISBN9781465993526
    Unavailable
    Spilling Clarence
    Author

    Anne Ursu

    Anne Ursu is the author of The Shadow Thieves, The Siren Song, and The Immortal Fire, all books in the Cronus Chronicles series. She has also written novels for adults. Anne teaches at Hamline University's Masters of Fine Arts in Writing for Children for Young Adults. She lives in Minneapolis with her son and cats.

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    Reviews for Spilling Clarence

    3.5/5

    7 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a debut novel and the setting is a small town in Minnesota. It is a book about memory. I think it could be listed as science fiction in a sense as it talks about brain and neurotransmitters.
      I read one review that suggested this author's style of writing is like Poisonwood Bible/Barbara Kingsolver. I can see the effort to make words themselves of interest but Kingsolver is really good at it and I thought Ursu was "straining" too much.
      This is not one of my fav
    • 4/5
      Many thanks to Terri Loeffler for this recommendation!When small town Clarence, Minnesota experiences a chemical explosion from the manufacturer of a mind altering, anti depressant, the pharmaceutical factory isn't the only thing that melts down.Systematically the town folk are bombarded with images from their past. While some memories are positive, the majority of Clarence experiences thoughts and obsessions regarding mistakes they made.A turn meant for the right becomes the left with tragic results. A marriage to a non-love of a life causes an elderly woman to ruminate about choices that could have/should have been made.As an external air of complacency renders the town dormant, internally the brains of he residents are working over time.The author's fascinating work examines the definition of memory, ie how "real" are the events we remember. Is forgetting the best defensive mechanism the mind holds?Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my all time favorite books. It has a funny, touching, haunting story about memory, the stories we tell ourselves and what it means to love.
    • 4/5
      Ursu has a knack for creating a completely ridiculous scenario that turns out to be completely serious, and she writes it so you completely buy into it and are very concerned about the characters and their plight. This pivotal event in Splling Clarence is a psychopharmaceutical chemical spill that unlocks peoples' memories. The book is a fascinating study in memory and how we desperately *need* to forget things and suppress certain memories just to be able to function on a daily basis. More than that, though, this book is a character study of several people with troubled pasts and troubled presents. The effect of the unlocking of the memories provides a way of getting to know each of the main characters. Ursu does this with flair and with writing that proceeds in a variety of quirky textures. The most rewarding part of this book, in my opinion, is seeing what effect an extended encounter with their pure past has on what the characters will do with their futures.
    • 3/5
      This was one of the most melancholy books I have ever read. While it was well written and most of the characters were well drawn - I found it lacking the depth that her follow-up - The Disapparation of James displayed.I still believe that Ursu is one of the most exciting new authors I have read in a while - but the relentless tone of this book made it hard to read.
    • 3/5
      After I finished reading Anne Ursu’s novel Spilling Clarence, I promptly forgot about its events and characters. This doesn’t bode well for a book whose plot hinges on memory. Not the sudden loss of memory, but the unexpected remembrance of things past. The trouble with Ursu’s novel is it’s too easy to forget. It’s the equivalent of fogged breath on a window. You can practically see this little patch of a book shrink, fade, vanish. It’s too bad, really, because Ursu (making her debut here) casts a pleasant, rhythmic spell with her words and the story certainly has potential. Unfortunately, neither plot nor language rise above the ordinary. Spilling Clarence is about….is about…. —Um, can you excuse me for a minute? I need to refresh my memory. [whispery riffle of turning pages] [soft groan of brain cells rousing and getting back to work] Ah yes, here we go…now I remember. Sort of. Spilling Clarence is about the aftermath of an accident at a psychopharmaceutical factory in Clarence, Minnesota. The town and the drug released into the atmosphere—deletrium—are fictional, but the ghosts of Love Canal and Three Mile Island are never far away. The odorless deletrium wafts across Clarence, seeping into brains, firing neurons and releasing memories in every resident. This is okay if you’re only nine years old, but what if you’re seventy-nine and must cope with everything from first loves to the horrors of Auschwitz (not to mention having to relive bad-fashion eras like the 70s)? Understandably, the elderly population takes the accident pretty hard, some of them succumbing to catatonia. For the most part, characters sit around anxiously fretting over the home movies playing in their heads. Pages and pages of crying jags, sleeplessness and lethargy later, the reader begins to wonder at the sanity of the town’s residents. Few, if any, do the logical thing: move out of town at least until the cloud of deletrium dissipates. I suppose I shouldn’t expect logic from a story like this. It is, after all, a fairy tale—or, more accurately, one of those quirky-town movies we like to call “dramadies.â€? Ursu’s pen skips lightly across the page, breezing through the plot with characters the thickness of paper dolls. Most of them seem to be wearing demeanors clipped from your average Anne Tyler novel. Ursu’s omniscient voice—the novel’s strongest suit—is like a roving camera going down the elm-lined streets, peeping behind curtains, interrupting breakfasts. We eavesdrop, but we never really get to know (or love) these poor memory-fraught folks. It’s been more than a month since I finished Spilling Clarence and the only person I can recall with any accuracy is Madeleine, a novelist in the twilight of her life who must cope with memories of an unsatisfying marriage to a husband long dead. Madeleine is warm and personable, but as for the rest—her freshly-widowed son, his precocious daughter, a young unhappy woman, her workaholic fiancée—ah…fuhgeddaboudit.
    • 3/5
      Spilling Clarence, what an interesting yet ambiguous book title. Only when I picked it up and riffled it did I realize the premise of the book was way more interesting than the title might have suggested.Clarence was the name of the town where Anne Ursu's story unravels. The town is home of a pharmaceutical company which prides itself with the memory retrieval pill Deletrium. An explosion of the company's manufacturing plant not only disturbed the hush of the town but sent an immeasurable waft of memory-provoking gas throughout town. While the plant assured the chemical spill of Deletrium was not toxic; the medical substance did trigger brain receptors and unleash memories that were repressed in the brain. The inevitable outcome was a retrieval of memories, pleasant and painful, caught up with townspeople who had been exposed to the vapor.Bennie, a psychology professor, was among those who in the least appreciated the chemical as it brought back painful memories of his deceased wife Lizzie. Bennie is a single-father who raised 9-years-old Sophie. Bennie's mother, Madeline, who lived in a retirement home, recounted her stricken years as a mother and widow. Susannah, an aide at the retirement home and took care of Madeline, also got her share of grieving reminiscence about her mother who suffered from mental illness. Her fiance Todd was a student at a local college working toward his degree. While the book mainly focused on the three aforementioned characters, Ursu's rich but not sating narrative touched on many other townspeople and their pasts. Even the paltry characters were etched.The book deals with grievances of the pasts and how diligently people tried to put behind the painful loss. As intriguing as it may be, the book also brought to surface the nature of loneliness. It seemed to me that the troubled past, the bitterness, the sadness had imposed such formidable hurdle in the characters that they couldn't break away from their loneliness.I want to remind fellow readers that this book is quite promising as Anne Ursu's debut novel. While Ursu doesn't play around with winding skeins of words that unspool and render elegantly like some of the most acclaimed prose stylists of our time; her writing is taut, crisp, and clear. She bears the tour de force to take her readers back and forth in time to make reference to reminiscence and to weave together various incidences in the lives of her characters. This is done somehow seamlessly and not obscurely.Spilling Clarence is a relatively short book. It would be a perfect choice for a summer read though parts of it (the reminiscence) can be very depressing. I read it out of the curiosity for its unique and tantalizing premise and slipped it in between my arduous reading projects for a breath of fresh air.