Crawling At Night
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Crawling At Night: A Novel |
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| Author: | Nani Power |
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| Publisher: | Atlantic Monthly Press |
Ito is a literate yet tongue-tied sushi chef who recites haiku in his head as he labors over shopping lists, which at once define and confine him. Alone in his apartment at night, he reads pornographic comics while dreaming of Mariane, a lost, alcoholic waitress who works with him at a Chelsea sushi bar. Ito’s loneliness is punctuated by flashbacks of his life in Japan, of the dead wife whom he betrayed, as well as of his beloved mistress, Xiu-Xiu.
Across town, Mariane lies in her bath with a drink in her hand, longing for the baby girl she left behind almost fifteen years before. She plans to save her money, get her life and her “baby” back, only to wash her dreams away yet again with alcohol and sordid sex with strangers.
In the spinning haze of two nights in Manhattan, Ito and Mariane find themselves careening on a downward spiral through the dark streets of the city. As they navigate a sea of alcohol, sex, and exotic food, we are taken inside the minds of the scarred people they encounter, whose paths, like the streets of the city itself, criss-cross and overlap, skimming one another for some sort of connection.
Crawling at Night is a dazzling evocation of the way people draw each other in to absorb the shock of loneliness, and how they then either drift out of orbit or are pushed away. With heartbreaking intimacy, Power shows that the dark, prurient underside of the city and its struggling inhabitants is but an extension of the purest, most noble longings and intentions of those very same, very human people.
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