An Untamed State
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| Author | Roxane Gay |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Grove Atlantic |
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Publication date
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2014 |
| ISBN | |
An Untamed State is the debut novel of writer Roxane Gay, first published in 2014 by Grove Atlantic.
While vacationing with her husband and child in Haiti, Mireille Duval Jameson is kidnapped. When her father, a wealthy Haitian developer, refuses to pay her ransom, she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors, who keep her imprisoned for 13 days before finally releasing her.
In the first portion of the book, called "Happily Ever After," the novel moves back and forth in time between Mireille's captivity and her earlier life, meeting and falling in love with husband Michael during graduate school in the Midwest of the United States.
The latter section of the novel, "Once Upon a Time," follows Mireille in the aftermath of her trauma, including her time living with Michael's mother, Lorraine, on the family farm in Nebraska.
Commentary on An Untamed State frequently cites the novel's emphasis on fairy tale. Reviewing the novel for the Los Angeles Times, Chris Daley suggests the fairy tale theme serves to translate unspeakable trauma: "Written from Mireille's perspective, 'An Untamed State' is an account of what is normally unaccountable: a level of trauma that, even if it is survived, is often too painful to relate. From the first sentence, we know Mireille has found a way to craft her story to make it bearable. She frames it as a fairy tale: 'Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped[...]'" In The New York Times, Holly Bass said in contrast to contemporary, happy-ending-focused fairy tales, Gay's interpretation of the genre recalled "the real horrors of the original Brothers Grimm stories and their ilk...that a passing stranger raped Sleeping Beauty as she lay unconscious, or that Snow White’s jealous stepmother not only called for her death but wanted to eat her liver and lungs. Roxane Gay’s striking debut novel, 'An Untamed State,' is a fairy tale in this vein, its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great pain and high cost."
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