About Uncle
$16.95
Additional Info
- ISBN: 978-1-949641-55-4
- Size: 4.5" x 7"
- Pages: 148
- Publication Date: February 20, 2024
- Distributed By: Publishers Group West
“Wry and funny and rich in strange new forms of discomfort…a slim volume that cuts deep.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
At an age when she’d rather be making her own way in the world, an unnamed young woman finds herself moving to a small town at the seaside to care for her uncle. He’s a disabled war veteran with questionable habits, prone to drinking, gorging, and hoarding—not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time. When the world starts to shut down, Uncle and his niece become closer than ever. She knows his every move—every bathroom break he takes, every pill he swallows—and finds herself relying more and more on this strange man, her only company in a shrinking world. But then Uncle’s health takes a turn for the worse: He’s sent to a hospital that cares for cats, dogs, and Uncles, and any way for her to make sense of this eerie new reality, and her place within it, falls apart.
Poet-novelist Rebecca Gisler’s debut novel, set against our increasingly disjointed world, welcomes readers into a home of shut-ins as cozy as it is claustrophobic. Gisler’s bright, winding prose, masterfully translated from French by Jordan Stump, offers a rare witness to the complex ways in which we order our lives, for better or worse, inside and out.
Praise
“A cumulative portrait of a family is drawn with dark humor and inexhaustible affection…Through a series of digressions that seem to pull from Beckett, Kafka, and entomology, the narrator recounts the life of her mother’s brother, passing from a delightfully grotesque focus on his body (“I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet”) to an expansive and deeply empathetic vision of his past.”
—Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
“A dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics.…Gisler writes with a breathless quality, as if the narrator ran into her room to write this novel before the world collapsed, as if pulling these memories from her psyche against time so as not to lose them.… The rhythm and pacing are where Jordan Stump’s translation skills really shine. The words flow and bounce off each other as if originally written in the English language, demonstrating a mastery of lyricism and style in short fiction. ”
—Sharon Beriro, Asymptote
“No other writer has captured the singular beauty of the northern French coast like Rebecca Gisler in her debut novel… [Uncle] is vivid and contradictory, his depths obscured, his horizon distant.”
—Charlie Connelly, New European
“About Uncle delivers emotional weight with a smile…[it] successfully blends a quirky comedy with an undertow of sadness.”
—John Self, The Critic
“Swiss author Gisler’s first novel…depict[s] the delicate dance between a peculiar man and the young adults who are forced to handle him. . . . Gisler asks if we can ever really know the people in our families. Perhaps acceptance doesn’t require understanding—when Uncle gets in the mud, we pull up our pants legs and join him.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Gisler fills each page with breathless and winding sentences that infectiously convey the narrator’s exasperation with Uncle, who acts as a deliciously disgusting foil, spitting when he eats, peeing in bottles, and forever shuffling around the house in dirty sweatpants. It’s a cockeyed yet authentic depiction of the relentlessness of family obligations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“While the novel is short at just over 160 pages, Gisler is a maximalist with her wild, thrilling sentences.”
—Electric Literature
“Wry and funny and rich in strange new forms of discomfort, About Uncle is a slim volume that cuts deep, revealing the soft ligaments of family relations and letting them gleam under the light.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“Disquieting, tender, painfully precise, the language of Gisler is a language of embodiment. To read Uncle is to become him.”
—Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
“About Uncle is a diamond-sharp gem of a novel about the inescapable bonds of family. Once you meet him, you, too, will never be free of Uncle.”
—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes, CA)
“About Uncle has a charming way about it and with its greasy grip on reality, it manages to at once both delight and disgust.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s (Portland, OR)
“Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle is compelling and repulsive in equal measure, like watching slow motion footage of food scraps in a compost pile. There’s something about life in here, but it’s turning to dirt. Imagine Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work, but more grimy, slimy, and smelly. I devoured it, including the mold and flies, and I can still smell it on my breath.”
—Timothy Otte, Wild Rumpus Books (Minneapolis, MN)
“Gisler’s short, hypnotic novel, set in a coastal village on the outskirts of France, chronicles Uncle’s life on the outskirts of society. It’s a portrait of the tender, strange, and disgusting obligations of familial love. As Uncle retreats further and further from the world, he retreats into an animal self. Niece and nephew care for him almost as if he’s a pet. The story meanders through the family’s history, charting all the ways their lives have bent and deformed to grow around an immovable Uncle. What a mesmerizing book!”
—Chris Lee, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)
“A monstrous little novel for a monstrous little man…An uncle like a screwed-up ogre, someone we’d prefer to avoid as much as we’d like to protect him from a world that wasn’t made for him. In a hundred pages cracked to let the light through, Rebecca Gisler delivers a tasty and strangely sweet ode to the wobbly and fragile.”
—Dominique Fidel, Simple Things
Additional Materials
Rebecca Gisler
Rebecca Gisler, born in Zurich in 1991, is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute and of the Master’s degree in Création littéraire at the University of Paris 8. She writes in German and French and translates her texts from one language into another. She has published poetry and prose in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is the co-organizer of the series Teppich in the House of Literature Zürich. In 2020 Rebecca Gisler won the 28th Open Mike literature competition.
Books
Rebecca Gisler, born in Zurich in 1991, is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute and of the Master’s degree in Création littéraire at the University of Paris 8. She writes in German and French and translates her texts from one language into another. She has published poetry and prose in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is the co-organizer of the series Teppich in the House of Literature Zürich. In 2020 Rebecca Gisler won the 28th Open Mike literature competition.
Jordan Stump
Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine. His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Books
Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine. His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Excerpt
Uncle always sits in the spot nearest the television, and I always sit in the spot farthest from uncle, and my brother, before he left us, took to sitting well away from the table, and away from uncle and away from me, because he was happier eating on the couch, behind uncle’s back, and sometimes, in those not-so-long-ago days when the TV was working, uncle watched the news as he ate, and when he watched the news he turned up the sound as loud as it would go, and the frightening, sensationalistic news dispensed by the tiny old television distracted him from his eating, and one of his favorite things was to comment on and exaggerate the stories being reported, and he said it was going to be 600 degrees out the next day, and he said a comet would soon graze the coast of Brittany, and he said the virus was spread by fly bites, and he said there were giant ticks on the Belgian border, and I knew my brother was finding it harder and harder to hear uncle spout those absurdities, and sometimes my brother tried to explain to uncle why he shouldn’t believe everything they said on TV, but that’s not how uncle saw it, he said the world was more interesting this way, swollen, inflated, glutted with faraway, murderous happenings, like a low-budget disaster movie played over and over.