Kathryn Bromwich's first novel, At the Edge of the Woods, both chills and charms with its fable-like story of a woman beginning a new life alone in a cabin outside a small Italian village.
First-person narrator Laura Mantovani is determined to simplify and forget: she revels in her close attention to her daily walks, her observations of nature, her humble fare, and austere human contacts. She supports her modest lifestyle with translations of medical texts for the village apothecary and tutoring a few well-off children; in the evenings, she reads widely. She briefly takes a lover, before retreating into still deeper solitude and communion with the natural world. Readers wonder what she has escaped from--until a contact from her past life turns up on the doorstep.
Bromwich's prose is sedately paced, erudite, and textured in its observations of nature. Laura has a sly sense of humor and a deep distrust of humankind. As her story advances, her relationship to reality shifts and slides. She has visions. "The woods seem to have taken on unusual colors--not just deeper but slightly off. Certain tree trunks appear a lurid purple; tangerine and teal leaves wave in the breeze." The villagers call her strega (witch), because an independent woman alone is otherwise too much to grasp. Laura has created a new life for herself, a world in which her needs make sense in new ways, but human society still looms.
At the Edge of the Woods is wise, ethereal, haunting, filled with both beauty and horror. Brief but thoughtful, lush in its descriptions, this is a novel of introspection. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia