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    The Annunciation
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    The Annunciation
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    The Annunciation
    Ebook354 pages5 hours

    The Annunciation

    By Ellen Gilchrist

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    At the heart of Ellen Gilchrist’s novel is the incorrigible Amanda McCamey. Leaving a troubled past behind, she marries into New Orleans’ high society but finds the privileged world stifling and unsatisfying. Seeking a quieter, more meaningful life, she divorces and moves to the Ozarks where she translates poetry and surrounds herself with artists and intellectuals. Her friend Katie, a brilliant sculptor, brings out the wild child in Amanda, but it is Will, an intense young musician, who captivates her. What begins as a sexual tryst quickly becomes a grand and impossible passion that mirrors the life of the eighteenth-century French poet whose work Amanda is translating. But her new life is interrupted when her past comes back to haunt her. With beauty, humor, and luminescent prose, Gilchrist paints an evocative portrait of a woman finally coming into her own.

    Praise:
    "Gilchrist's accomplished first novel is absorbing, rich, and evocative as she explores the heart and mind of a woman who has the courage to risk traveling an unconventional path in an effort to find the way to herself." —Publishers Weekly

    "Women’s fiction par excellence … Amanda is in some ways a receptacle for current romantic clichés, but she is also a vivid character or dash and humor [who] has at last made her way to autonomy." —Harper's Magazine

    "A fast-paced, often funny and touching novel." —Library Journal

    "Both stylish and idiomatic—a rare and potent combination." —Times Literary Supplement

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDCA, Inc.
    Release dateNov 22, 2013
    ISBN9781940941172
    Unavailable
    The Annunciation
    Author

    Ellen Gilchrist

    Ellen Gilchrist (1935-2024) was author of several collections of short stories and novellas including The Cabal and Other Stories, Flights of Angels, The Age of Miracles, The Courts of Love, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Victory Over Japan (winner of the National Book Award), Drunk With Love, and I Cannot Get You Close Enough. She also wrote several novels, including The Anna Papers, Net of Jewels, Starcarbon, and Sarah Conley.

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    Reviews for The Annunciation

    3.5/5

    30 ratings4 reviews

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    • 1/5
      It's turning out to be a bit of a pot-boiler with cliched language. There's one awful blunder where the protagonist is supposed to know French and Italian but in a couple of places counts in French and Spanish, but to top it off says nieve instead of nueve for nine - nieve means snow. Still I'll keep reading to see if it actually talks much about translating.
    • 3/5
      Great first half, so-so second half -- but it was a very important book for me in my 20s, and my favorite for many years.
    • 2/5
      Well-written, yes, but I just couldn't care about these characters. I don't empathize with people who are so self-absorbed and who feel sorry for themselves despite having so many advantages.
    • 3/5
      Ellen Gilchrist's first novel "The Annunciation" (1983) makes clear, from its title and cover illustration through the story itself, that it is a religious story, even though most of the time it is so irreligious it becomes easy to doubt the author really has matters of faith on her mind.The novel spans 30 years, from the birth of Amanda McGamey's first child to the birth of her second. These are not easy years for Amanda, primarily because of the circumstances surrounding that first birth. She is just 14 when, after having sex with her cousin, Guy, she gives birth, then has her daughter taken away by nuns and put up for adoption. That experience condemns her to three decades of negative reaction: depression, strong drink, marriage to a man she doesn't love and constant thoughts about her daughter.Amanda has little use for religion, especially the Catholic Church, yet she experiments with various Eastern faiths and practices, whatever happens to be faddish among the intelligentsia at the time. She is a smart, attractive, charismatic woman who starts putting her life together when she abandons New Orleans, where she suspects her daughter lives somewhere, for Fayetteville, Ark. (where Gilchrist herself lives) and wins an opportunity to translate a book of French poetry. Illustrative of her personality, Amanda tries to convince the publisher to change the original poems to match her translation, which she is convinced is superior.Meanwhile, she begins a torrid romance with an unemployed man two decades younger. She keeps giving him money even though he always spends it on self-destructive binges.Last Saturday night I heard Irish singer Cathie Ryan perform in St. Pete with the Florida Orchestra. She sang a song she said illustrated one of the guiding principles of her life: "Don't quit five minutes before the miracle." That line works for Amanda McGamey, too. For all her mistakes and disappointments, she doesn't quit. Her miracle is no virgin birth, whatever the novel's title and cover may suggest. It's 30 years too late for that. Yet smaller, more everyday miracles can be life-changing, too, and that's what Gilchrist gives her.