The Vanishers

Weird, ferocious, passionate, funny and heart wrenching, all these adjectives and more come to mind while reading "The Vanishers." Heidi Julavits's strange novel manages to be a surrealistic psychic noir mystery, a satire of academia and modern medicine, while also simultaneously exploring female relationships -- mother to daughter, teacher to student, friend to friend, enemy to enemy -- with an intensity that humor can only mask for so long. As odd as all this sounds, it is also eminently readable.As the book opens, the narrator, Julia Severn is a student of the psychic sciences at the Institute of Paranormal Psychology, also known as The Workshop. Her mentor, the powerful Madame Ackermann, hired Julia to transcribe her regression travels, but has been unable to produce results. While Madame Ackermann sleeps Julia has, without her employer's knowledge, tried to cover for her by making up transcripts of their sessions. Madame Ackermann tumbles to the deception and in retribution launches a psychic attack on Julia that ruins her health and forces her to leave the workshop. After retreating to New York and a mindless job, Julia is approached by a pair of researchers who are seeking a once famous artist and offer Julia treatment in return for using her psychic powers to their advantage. Julia meanwhile, hopes the quest will help her to forge a link with her mother, who committed suicide when she was a month old. As expected, nothing turns out to be what Julia expects.Who is attacking whom? Who is seeking whom? Where is the border between sanity and insanity? The twists and turns of the plot are complicated by characters who refuse to remain anchored in time and space, life or death and will leave you gasping at the imagination that dreamed up this manic chase. Despite the frenetic forward movement of the story, at its heart, "The Vanishers" is a bildungsroman about coping with grief and loss, especially when the void is created by suicide or disappearance.If you get to the end and are left with questions, don't worry, that is Julavits' point. Ambiguity is an essential component of the human condition and learning to live means learning to live with seemingly contradictory impulses governing our relationships.It is a book worth reading and, in my opinion, rereading.

Heidi Julavits is one of my favorite authors. Yet when her new novel, The Vanishers, was released, I waited 8 months to begin reading it. Why? Because Julavits loves to f*** with her readers, and I didn't want to start the book until I was in the proper mood to be f***ed with.In October, I had lots of fun visiting some haunted houses with my friends, and I was sad when Halloween was over. I loved the rush of adrenaline at not knowing what's around each turn, not knowing who to trust, not knowing when that statue will turn out to be alive or when a monster will emerge from a dark corner, but knowing that it's all in good fun and I'm not in any real danger. So it was in that frame of mind that I began reading The Vanishers.The Vanishers delivers. Madame Ackermann looks just like Julia's mother ... Dominique Varga may or may not have had a daughter ... Alwyn tells the psychiatrist a different story than Julia does, and the psychiatrist belives Alwyn ... Julia sees people no one else can.And of course, Julia is a desperately unreliable narrator, telling stories that directly contradict what other characters seem to be experiencing. Why does everyone else think Julia is crazy, or wrong, or gifted, when Julia herself doesn't? Who is right and who is wrong?In the story, Julia falls further and further from grace: from cryptographer to archivist to working class citizen to treatment facility to an assortment of treatment facilities with increasingly strict lockdown rules. She appears to fall all the way into the depths of insanity ... and then is restored to dignity - or is she? The ending completely f***s with you because you have no idea what or who to believe, because Julia's credibility has been completely stripped from her. The book is a bumpy ride, and god did I love coming along for the trip!

This isn't the typical novel I go for, and that being said, I found that I really enjoyed this book much to my surprise!This is very clean, concise storytelling, but that does not mean this story is flat or boring.On the contrary!This is a fantastical trip into a bizarre world made to feel completely plausible and absolutely real. I found myself ever more curious as I fell further down the rabbit hole of The Vanishers! It was an absolute delight to read and I finished the book with a complete sense of wonder and can remember just thinking how intense and just great that reading experience just was!And that is exactly what you want from a book! A new world, a sense of curiosity, the fantastical seeming plausible, and characters that you think you understand and on some level can imagine might actually exist somewhere.I was really taken aback by how good this was. It's a great read if you want to spend a little time shaking up your perception of things and tumbling down a truly suspenseful and pretty mind blowing road.Give it a chance, if absolutely nothing else it's unlike anything else out there and is absolutely unforgettable!

This book started SO well. I was so excited. And then the book lost its way and threw so many new characters into the plot that soon I didn't know or care what was happening. It felt like the protagonists motivation was stunted by her coolness and her lack of development made this a tough book to remain engaged with. Worth reading for the first twenty pages alone, though I felt sad this was not maintained.

Dieser Roman war für mich eine Achterbahnfahrt der Gefühle. Schon nach wenigen Seiten war ich fest entschlossen, das Buch zu lieben, es ist großartig geschrieben und geheimnisvoll. Eigentlich könnte ich gar nichts Schlechtes darüber sagen, wenn nicht...ja, wenn ich nicht gegen Ende das Gefühl gehabt hätte, immer mehr den Faden zu verlieren, den Anspielungen und Verweisen immer weniger folgen zu können und schließlich aus Pflichtgefühl weiter zu lesen.Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob es mehr an mir oder am Buch lag, es wird einen starken Eindruck hinterlassen, aber es war zum Ende hin auch anstrengend. Auf jeden Fall habe ich eine neue Berufsbezeichnung gelernt: Astraldetektiv(in).