Glaciers

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Overview

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers ...

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Glaciers

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More About This Book

Overview

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Smith’s debut unspools in delicate links of linear thought, told (mostly) in deceptively simple sentences embedded in the consciousness of Isabel, born in the Pacific Northwest and raised in Alaska with her older sister. Isabel dreams of Amsterdam and, “though she has never been, and probably will never go,” she believes everything is perfect there. The story ostensibly covers a single day, but Isabel’s recorded memories reach back to childhood, with incidents in between like a camping trip, an interaction with an astrologer, and a consequential encounter with an immense glacier. Isabel’s love of books leads her to get a job at the library, where she falls for co-worker “Spoke,” an Iraq war veteran whose sudden re-enlistment casts a long shadow, turning Isabel introspective at the festive party she’d planned to attend with him: “Spoke is already halfway across the country, where people are making breakfast, letting dogs out onto dewy lawns, boarding busses and trains for downtowns, lining up in coffee shops,” she thinks, while “n Amsterdam, it is already a lovely afternoon, the leaves turning, fall about to break.” This slim book’s lovely design respects and enhances Smith’s voice, with ample white space on every page and a general eschewing of commas and quotation marks. Lyrical and luminous. (Jan.)
Library Journal
How appropriate that on the last page of this spare, beautifully written first novel, one character asks another, "Tell us a story—about longing." For longing defines the life of Isabel, who grew up on Cook Inlet in Alaska and, after a trip to towering Seattle, began collecting postcards from other cities, among them Paris, Budapest, and Barcelona. As an adult, Isabel finds a postcard depicting Amsterdam at a junk store she frequents—she loves old things; her job is restoring damaged books at a library—and she is astonished to find that the postcard was actually sent. The message on the back of the card inspires her to construct a story about sender and recipient. Isabel needs to work a little harder to construct her own story, though; once an ungainly child, she's still tentative about relationships and gingerly approaches Spoke, a colleague at the library who served in Iraq. A series of events, one involving a note about Amsterdam left in a book she's repairing, wheels her gracefully in a different direction. VERDICT Not for those who like big, splashy reads, this book is just the thing for more meditative readers who savor language and quiet reflection.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Library Journal
Rideout’s novel is particularly effective in how it aligns a single day in Ruth’s life with Mallory’s great endeavor. Fans who appreciate a writer who plays with time and weaves in and out of different stories and moments may also enjoy Smith’s new work. This novel traces one day in the life of Isabel, a young woman living in Portland, as she arrives for work at the library, shops for a dress at a vintage store, and thinks about the party she will attend that night. Interspersed throughout the day are her reflections on her childhood, her collection of postcards, and her thoughts and conversations with Spoke, a war vet who also works in the library and whom Isabel has longed after for some time. In lyrical, prose, Smith nimbly fills in the past history of Isabel and Spoke, delicately dancing around their abrupt courtship, and muses on themes of yearning and loss. Smith’s aborted love story of longing is a tiny gem.

(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781935639206
  • Publisher: Tin House Books
  • Publication date: 1/17/2012
  • Series: A Tin House New Voice
  • Pages: 112
  • Sales rank: 250,454
  • Product dimensions: 5.00 (w) x 7.20 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Interviews & Essays

A Conversation with Alexis Smith
How long have you been working on Glaciers? Do you remember how it began? How has it evolved from the beginning?
I have been working on Glaciers for the last five years, with some breaks. It began as a series of prose poems about my childhood in Alaska. I was in my second or third semester of the MFA in Writing program at Goddard College. During the winter residencies I would fly out to Vermont from Portland for a week of true winter. Walking through the snowy woods to the library, listening to the creaking trees and feeling the cold on my face, really brought me back to being a kid on my grandparents' homestead outside Kenai.
The story has evolved a lot. When I started writing I was a footloose twenty-something bookseller, and now I'm a homebody thirty-something single mom. In the early days of writing, there was so much more angst--mine and Isabel's. The first year as a mother knocked the impulse to navel-gaze right out of me. My focus, and Isabel's, turned outward, to other people's stories.
Many writers have a few practice novels in the drawer. Is this your first novel?
No other novels in the drawer--just drafts of this one. This was my practice novel, in many ways. I learned so much about writing and being a writer from this book. Practical things like, how to write at the laundromat (and other unlikely places), and how to trick your brain into forgetting the internet (key: keep a big dictionary handy). And, other things, too--structural and stylistic and thematic things--but the most important thing being that writing a novel is more about getting shit done than about being a certain kind of thoughtful, articulate, creative person.
Why did you choose to have the novel take place over only one day? What benefits do you have as a writer with this structure?
I'll admit to being a big fan of Mrs. Dalloway, so that was a huge influence. I love how Virginia Woolf uses the present as a point of reference for the past. In a diurnal narrative, the point of reference is pretty static. Not much changes in the characters' lives in the course of a day, so it's an interesting way to examine memories and how they play in the background of daily life, informing relationships and feeding desires. There may not be room for big drama, but there's plenty of room for the smaller details that get lost in multi-generational sagas.
Tell us about the title? How does the environment figure into this book?
My generation came of age at the same time as the idea of global warming. We entered adulthood almost simultaneously with the passing of the Kyoto Protocol by the United Nations. For me, having grown up in spitting distance of actual glaciers, the idea of glaciers disappearing was shocking. Glaciers seemed like living things, to me: they grow each year, or at least did for millennia; they move and have their own inertia; they are record keepers, time capsules; and they have shaped the earth's surface over time.
All of those things can also be said for human beings. Human populations moving over the planet, over centuries, have shaped the earth with cities and infrastructure, mining, etc. We move where the resources and food are, carrying things with us, leaving other things behind. The glaciers had their day in shaping the planet, and now we are having ours. It just so happens that all of these cycles eventually come to an end, and ours is of our own making. Isabel is reckoning with the intersection of those stories: the smaller human stories (loves, losses, change), and the bigger historical and environmental stories (wars, natural disasters).
I was worried for a long time that the title was too oblique, that it would come off as pretentious--or worse, too sober--for a story about a girl who really just wants to find the perfect dress and win the love of her work crush. But, somehow, it always felt like the only title that would do.
Who have you discovered lately?
Easy: Sarah Goldstein, whose first book, Fables, came out this year from Tarpaulin Sky Press. It is a gorgeous, haunting book along the lines of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping: brief, evocative chapters that go strange, dark places and occasionally leave you stunned. Fans of Kelly Link and Karen Russell would love Fables as well. Though, honestly, Goldstein immediately reminded me of the French poet, Liliane Giraudon (her out-of-print Sun & Moon Classics collection, Fur, is worth seeking out) who is a master of the uncanny modern fairy tale.
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 34 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(23)

4 Star

(4)

3 Star

(2)

2 Star

(2)

1 Star

(3)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 34 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 4, 2012

    Best Discovery of the Year

    Sometimes you find the book, and sometimes the book finds you. This was the case for me when, earlier this year, I walked into the Barnes and Noble in Bozeman, Montana "just to get a latte" (i.e., I wasn't on a typical book-buying mission). I was walking toward the cafe when it happened: Glaciers found me. It was like one of those "meet cute" scenes in movies when the pretty brunette dogwalker and the distracted guy with the briefcase, walking in opposite directions, round a corner at the same time and he ends up tangled in leashes and tails and she knocks the briefcase out of his hand, spilling papers all over the sidewalk. That's how it was for me with Alexis M. Smith's slim, pretty novel. A chance encounter. A walking past, then a double-take and a doubling-back. A glance at the cover. A skim of the plot summary, blurbs and first sentence ("Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably will never go."). An eye-poke of interest. An impulse buy.

    It was the best thing I bought all year (and that includes the 2011 GMC Acadia my wife and I just purchased).

    The novel chronicles one day in the life of Isabel, a twenty-eight-year-old library worker, as she repairs damaged books, prepares for a party, and pines for a co-worker, an Iraq War veteran named "Spoke." As a single woman living in Portland, Oregon, Isabel haunts thrift stores and collects second-hand items like postcards, teacups, aprons, dresses--the cast-off remnants which were once new, happy purchases by someone decades earlier. "She feels a need to care for them that goes beyond an enduring aesthetic appreciation," Smith writes. "She loves them like adopted children."

    It's fitting that Isabel collects scraps of the past because she is a character who lives primarily in memory. The book slips seamlessly between the present and Isabel's childhood growing up in Alaska and Portland with her mother, father and sister Agnes. Written in sentences as simple and delicate and beautiful as a single strand of a spider's silk, Glaciers reads like a literal dream. We move through the pages quickly, as if floating just above the words, and it's over before we want it to be. I could have stayed in Isabel's world for a long, long time.

    Glaciers is easily one of the best books I've read this year. It's beautifully packaged by Tin House Books--French flaps, deckle-edge pages, generous white space around the text--and even more gorgeous, chapter by chapter, sentence after sentence, word to word.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 4, 2012

    Blacklove

    "Please... I was never loved. I changed my name to Blacklove." She whispered. "I never liked my name. Listen. My brother gets on my nook and kes it look like Im evil. He just got off of it so I dont know what he has done." She stood. She looked at Icystar and bowed. "If you wish me to leave I will. Just say so. I will go back to begging for food because i was only taught to kill cats. I neer liked that. I want to be clean. I want starclan. I want to be loved." She stopped. "But if you want me to stay, I will. And I will understand any hate given to me." She sat, waiting for a response. Before anyone could answer she added, "And I understand if you think it is a trick. But its not. I swear."

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted August 24, 2012

    warm read

    Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

    Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted February 23, 2012

    Great!

    This is a great book. Love it!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 28, 2012

    Glacierpaw

    He pads through the icy forest, hoping green leaf would come soon

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 11, 2012

    What am I missing here? So many five stars? I found this book to

    What am I missing here? So many five stars? I found this book totally B-O-R-I-N-G and it lacked the punch I expected.....

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 28, 2012

    Nightjay

    I killed icystar for goodness sake.she was an evil cat.she destroyed the clan.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 21, 2012

    Blazestar

    Weres Icystar I need her. Blazestar

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 4, 2012

    Shadetail

    *pads in silently* May i join IcyStar?

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 2, 2012

    BLACKSCREECH IS EVIL!!!!!

    Look at shadow of blood

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 1, 2012

    Moonshimmer

    Watches

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 1, 2012

    Starpaw

    Can i join i am a white she cat with green eyes i need a mentor

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 10, 2012

    Nightheart to atralgod

    "Cut it out!" She snaps. She dissapeers and is transported to arctic result 1.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 9, 2012

    Astralgod

    I did not kill icystar...I can bring her back, if you want

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 2, 2012

    Morph

    Im a cat named lepordpelt i would like to join the clan

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 9, 2012

    Foxleap

    Hisses. "No. Shes dead. But i will wisely take her place as leader. Since Fireblaze is never on." He whispers. "I shall be back before moonhigh." He says and pads out

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 4, 2012

    A kit to Icystar

    My name is fire and that blackscreech cat is evil she is a kitnapper!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 2, 2012

    Warning

    Do not let Blackscreech join she is evil!Go to Shadow of blood to see for yourself!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 6, 2012

    NOOOOOOO

    Please Nooooo

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 31, 2012

    Crowpelt

    "No. She died by a polar bear or badger."

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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