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    The Wallcreeper
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    The Wallcreeper
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    The Wallcreeper
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Wallcreeper

    Written by Nell Zink

    Narrated by Laurence Bouvard

    3/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘Heady and rambunctious … Wake up, this book says: in its plot lines, in its humour, in its philosophical underpinnings and political agenda. I'll pay it the highest compliment it knows – this book is a wild thing.’ New York Times Book Review

    Interlaken, Berne, 21st century. Several things happen after the car hits the rock. Tiff ceases to be pregnant. Stephen captures, like, the most wonderful bird – fleet, stealthy, and beautiful – a real “lifer”. And the wallcreeper, the wallcreeper says “twee”.

    The Wallcreeper is nothing more than a portrait of marriage, complete with all its requisite highs and lows: drugs, dubstep, small chores, anal sex, eco-terrorism, birding, breeding and feeding.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 18, 2015
    ISBN9780008130855
    Unavailable
    The Wallcreeper
    Author

    Nell Zink

    Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, and Nicotine, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.

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    Reviews for The Wallcreeper

    3/5

    102 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Throughout the first pages I was captured by Zink's energetic language which mates a colloquial tone with a lyrical quality (the same holds true for her choice of topics). The witty and sometimes even straight out funny cross-pollination of several seemingly mundane topics (relationship, sex, bird watching, environmental issues...) proposed a refreshing mixture and could deliver some original scenes. Unfortunately the story and its characters did not manage to capture me beyond about the middle of the book (and it's a thin book). Nevertheless, it's a fast and entertaining read, set in an offbeat, contemporary style.
    • 3/5
      Can't say I really understood the book but it was short and very funny in spots. Would like to read more by this author.
    • 3/5
      Nell Zink seems like an interesting writer, so I thought I'd begin at the beginning with her first novel.    I have never read Franzen, but I can't see WHY Zink is Franzen's protege, other than the billion birds mentioned in 'The Wallcreeper'.  (Somehow I thought the title "wallcreeper" had something to do with a different name for "wallflower", but with a worse, creepier connotation or something, blame that on the cover, I guess.  I never knew that wallcreeper was a bird.)  Which speaks to a larger theme that I can read this and notice that Zink is a VERY smart writer -- but smart as in she might be writing something that goes way over my head and the heads of most readers.  Or the book just doesn't really make sense to anyone?  Even Zink? I don't see the purpose of the book or what it was trying to do.  I would set this book on the shelf beside 'The Visitors' by Jessi Jezewska Stevens - both books share the same spirit, and both are also very smart and go over my head.  But 'The Visitors' is THE BEST. try it.
    • 3/5
      A strange haunting little story that goes somewhere but doesn’t really go anywhere either. I am struggling to recall the detail that matters. I enjoyed reading and it lead me to another of her books which I also read and enjoyed and am also struggling to remember. There was quite a bit of sex and separation and wondering and wandering but what was it really all about? Dunno.
    • 2/5
      Going into this book, all I knew about it was that it was “weird, but good” (actual quote from my friend who had to read it for grad school, and said I should, too). My friend was mostly right about that. It was a weird little book, and it wasn’t bad, but I remember putting the book down and not knowing whether I liked it and now, all these weeks later, I’m still unsure of my opinion as to whether it was ‘good.’ I’ve given it three stars, which isn’t a bad rating, but it isn’t an exceptionally ‘good’ rating either. I’m still not sure whether it’s the right rating for this book.The worst part about this book was, there was no point to it. I don’t generally care whether a book has a great plot as long as it has very solid characters, but the only character with any solidity is the narrator and to a far lesser extent her husband. And the relationship between them constantly annoyed me. It’s clear our narrator is married to the idea of needing a man around constantly so she never has to work. What’s unclear is how these two ended up together because it certainly doesn’t seem to be love, or even money. She simply seems to stay with him because he won’t make her get a job, and she really does not want a job.The ending to this book was the worst part to all of that, though I won’t spoil what happens. The event there came so abruptly that I had to re-read the passage several times as I was so sure I missed something.Still, there were some interesting pieces to the book. The settings were fun to lose myself in, in a sleepy sort of way, and there was a lot of information about birds that I’d never have known without reading this book. (Honestly I didn’t even know a wallcreeper was a type of bird going into this.) And though the relationship between the narrator and her husband constantly annoyed me for its substance, I thought the way it was portrayed was very well done. The way the narrator has affairs as if it’s no big deal, and her husband has affairs too and he also doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal, paints a very foreign to myself yet intriguing relationship.I personally don’t condone cheating, and in a lot of books it just annoys me when two characters cheat or emotionally cheat, especially if we’re supposed to be rooting for them. Here, though, I didn’t feel like I was supposed to be rooting for anyone, it was a just told matter-of-factly, and I greatly appreciated that.But I’m still not sure whether I actually liked this book.
    • 3/5
      Not a bad first novel, in fact much of the writing is very witty and makes good use of her wording......I liked this, and want to read more by this intelligent writer, but the story just seemed to end.......parts of this are very good, I'd recommend this, the wordplay in parts is brilliant.
    • 1/5
      Frantic ClevernessZink clamors for the reader's attention in every line, unremittingly, for an exhausting 150 pages. At times this works well. The opening pages are bound to be surprising, because there is not yet enough text to judge what she's up to. It works, as several of the hundreds of reviewers on Goodreads have noted, in the passage on anal sex, because it's unusual to see that subject treated to so many changes of viewpoint (pp. 7-8). But it does not work for the majority of the book. Like any author, Zink has a limited repertoire of strategies for producing unexpected turns of voice, mood, and image. Her commonest strategy is to write a few sentences with a more or less consistent viewpoint, and then draw a conclusion that is unexpectedly skewed. For example this passage, which follows on the death of the narrator's pet bird Rudi:"When Rudi died, Stephen stopped raising his eyes above the horizontal. He stopped going out at night or to the marsh [for bird watching]. He read every word of the newspaper, offering lengthy, cogent commentary on the financial news as if he had been asked to join the president's council of economic advisers. He enlightened me on the relations between oil-producing and -consuming states as if he were grooming me for a position on his staff. His personal interests were subrogated to those of the mass media, and he began to seem like a nearly normal person." [p. 45]Note that the third and fourth sentences are structurally similar to one another. In Zink's prose, whenever two or more sentences reinforce one another, it's a setup. The end of the last sentence I've quoted here is the kind of reversal that would serve as a satisfying end to a chapter in a novel by, say, Henry James (especially given the Jamesian nuance "nearly"). But Zink's sense of surprise demands successive reversals. The next sentences (there is no paragraph break) are:"He stopped shaking. He never got excited. When he went to bed his face turned into a slack, unhappy mask and he never looked at me before he closed his eyes."So the narrator's newly politicized and oddly bureaucratically minded husband turns out to be unhappy, listless, and unaffectionate. At this point the reader is being asked to hope the narrator can cure her husband of his strange mourning over the dead bird: perhaps, it's implied, she can revive his interest in her. Then Zink provides another turn:"Stephen's grief humanized him. I began to fall in love."This kind of double or triple surprise could function well if it were used once or twice in a novel, but it is one of Zink's principal strategies for keeping the reader's attention. Viewpoints and conclusions shift with a regularity that sometimes makes them into tics, turning a reader's thoughts to the author instead of the narrator. An even simpler strategy for holding the apparently easily bored reader's attention is changing subjects, images, and viewpoints as rapidly as possible. In this passage the narrator is looking out at Berne, Switzerland:"Berne lived turned in on itself. But it wasn't self-sufficient; it was more like a tumor with blood vessels to supply everything it needed: capital, expats, immigrants, stone, cement, paper, ink, clay, paint. No, not a tumor. A flower with roots stretching to the horizon, sucking in nutrients, but not just a single flower: a bed of mixed perennials. A flower meadow where butterflies could lay eggs and die in peace, knowing their caterpillars would not be ground to pulp by the flowers. Continuity of an aesthetic that had become an aesthetic of continuity. That was Berne. I leaned against the city wall and Elvis kissed me..." [pp. 17-18]First Berne is compared to a tumor, but the simile overspills itself, ending as a list of things that aren't related to the image. But that doesn't matter because the narrator cancels the metaphor, and tries the image of a flower; but in the next sentence that metaphor metastasizes into a meadow. Then comes the lovely but empty abstraction about aesthetics (how is it related to the flower metaphor?), and a blank assertion of the image's veracity ("That was Berne.").It's always possible to argue that kaleidoscopic writing like this expresses the narrator's state of mind, but that is inevitably the case. The question is whether or not the author is in possession of other kinds of writing she can use to express other feelings, other situations.I wouldn't argue that every novel needs to have a variety of paces (Bernhard and Beckett would be ready counterexamples), or that it is never a good idea to try to keep the reader's attention at every moment, line by line and image by image. Examples of books that do just that include, for me, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake; most of Mark Leyner; and much of Georges Perec. But Joyce also orchestrates changes in tone, voice, mood, and affect in different sections of the book; Leyner's anxiety about losing his reader's attention is his theme, fully acknowledged and made both ironic and pathetic; and Perec's strangeness is the result of self-imposed constraints, which themselves become objects of interest.Here there is only the relentless drive to produce entertaining turns of phrase, striking images, clever tropes, and surprising reversals at all times, on every page and in every paragraph, with as little filler as possible, for the entire duration of the novel. The result, for me, is exhausting and, I hope, forgettable.
    • 3/5
      I wouldn't be surprised if I alter this review at some point: I'm not sure when I've put down a book and been so completely in the dark whether I liked it or despised it. I honestly think it was a sentence-by-sentence vacillation. Part of the problem in my can't see the forest for the trees reading (a bit of a bad pun there, if you've read the novel) is that I kept having the sneaking suspicion that Zink was playing some larger narrative game that I was missing entirely. As a result, I felt like there was a tremendous meta/in-joke being whispered over my head. The alternative is that the themes were as sledgehammer-obvious as they appeared on the surface. I honestly don't know, and that's frustrating: it was either incredibly subtle or incredibly blatant in its themes. It was the wallcreeper metaphor itself-- which appears immediately-- that initially gave me this feeling, though there was much more to come. My solution to the frustration was to slow down (because it's easy to speed through a book that can appear short and breezy, it's hard to hit the brakes, but I do advise it) was to start focusing on the sentence level rather than the larger narrative arc(s), and I did enjoy this reading more. Zink can write some things that seem trite, cliché, or mundane (again, maybe the joke is on me). At other times, a phrase or some sentences really did just stop me and cause me to back up and reread. This back-and-forth is frustrating; there's a sense of digging for gems in gravel. I'll also admit that I may not be the ideal reader who is completely immersed in some of the environmental and more specifically European issues she takes on, but I do have at least a loose grasp of the situations. I was not further politicized by the novel, if that was even the aim, and I didn't even take up further research (which is something I often do, if I'm sufficiently interested). The telling left me lukewarm to cool. Part of that problem lies in the protagonists. There are a range of responses (all acceptable) to central characters, ranging from intense identification to complete detachment (or even active loathing). All can be used productively by an author. My response here was disinterest touched with frustration, and I'm not sure how it served my reading of the novel. I don't demand a character arc or traditional development, but the stock of one-dimensional characters was tiring and predictable-- up until Tiff's transformation (or not?) in the final pages of the book, which came out of nowhere. As of this writing, the novel left me not cold but lukewarm. There are micro-portions I enjoyed very much, but the overall novel really didn't resonate in any significant way.
    • 4/5
      Strangely enough, this is the second female-authored 2015 bestselling US novel about an adulterous expatriate American housewife living in Switzerland that I've read this year. However, putting down Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau and turning to Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, as I did while preparing this review, feels like leaping out of a coma singing the opening bars of Sha-La-La by Al Green. Rarely do you get such a chance to see how themes that were trite and plodding with one writer can become fresh and funny when described by someone else with wit and verve and vim and brio and zest and all the other things that Zink's writing has in spades.It's clear from other reviews that there's already some backlash against the Zink hype, which is understandable. For me, though, this was just 170 pages of pure enjoyment. And not in a fluffy way: her prose style is so smart and witty and allusive that some of the laughs came from sheer admiration. Her writing flits in and out of different tones and registers in a way that is technically much harder than it looks, and almost every double-page will throw at you literary call-backs, strange sex, binomial names, vertiginous changes of subject – random exclamations! – wading birds and excellent jokes.When I think back now to the opening line of Hausfrau – ‘Anna was a good wife, mostly’ – it seems to sum up everything that annoyed me about that novel's satisfaction in the character's coy self-deceptions; by comparison, a similar line in The Wallcreeper – ‘I was pretty bad as wives go’ – seems refreshingly, breezily direct. The Wallcreeper's own opening line, incidentally, is already quite famous for its near-parodic, creative-writing-course compression of incident:I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.Yep, sign me up – I was on board for this voice right away. And other comparisons are instructive too. In Hausfrau Essbaum uses German language lessons to try and reflect her character's emotional state, which involves many laboured metaphors on grammatical terms like ‘passive’ or ‘perfect’. It's a grind. Zink tries something similar but gets away with it, partly because she avoids the obvious and partly just because her ironic tone means you already grant her an assumption of self-awareness.At Elvis's suggestion I took a course in Berndeutsch. I learned ten verbs for work: work hard (drylige, bugle, chrampfe, schaffe, wärche), get stuck with jobs no one else wants to do (chrüpple), work slowly (chnorze), work carelessly (fuuschte), work absent-mindedly (lauere). Stay at home and putter around doing little harmless chores (chlütterle). I learned fast and the teacher said maybe it was an advantage my not knowing any German. Then the ten weeks of the course were over and I didn't know anything anymore, except that I would never look for a job.Elvis is the guy she's having extramarital sex with; he tells her he's a Montenegrin, although her husband doesn't believe it (‘He's Syrian if he's a day! “Elvis”! It's like a Filipino telemarketer calling himself Aragorn!’). All the frantic sleeping around makes the book read a little like a farce at times, except that the tone is used more as a way of dealing with difficult experiences than of avoiding them altogether. A painful and barely-consensual bout of anal sex with her husband, for instance, gets described like this:Now, all my life I had fantasized about being used sexually in every way I could think of on the spur of the respective moment. How naïve I was, I said to myself. In actuality this was like using a bedpan on the kitchen counter. I knew with certainty that “pain” is a euphemism even more namby-pamby than “defilement.” Look at Stephen! He thinks he’s having sex! Smell his hand! It’s touching my hair! I thought, Tiff my friend, we shall modify a curling iron and burn this out of your brain. But I didn’t say anything. I acted like in those teen feminist poems where it’s date rape if he doesn’t read you the Antioch College rules chapter and verse while you’re glumly failing to see rainbows. I was still struggling to dissociate myself into an out-of-body experience when Stephen came, crying out like a dinosaur.I gasped for air, dreading the moment when he would pull out, and thought, Girls are lame.This is so much more complex and interesting than all the moralistically-loaded bad sex that happens in Hausfrau – just look at how often Zink shifts gears through that paragraph. Stephen is no villain and the protagonist is certainly no victim; rather her irony shatters all good/bad experiences into a kaleidoscope of annoyance, amusement, self-reflection and philosophising. The way irony interacts with sex is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book, and also one of its subjects – Zink writes revealingly at one point that it's a character's ‘incapacity for irony’ that stops her ‘from coming across […] as anything but horny’.Certainly the plot – which concerns birdwatching and ecoterrorism – is a bit of a mishmash, and I can understand why some readers find the prose style too flyaway to settle into. I thought it was a delight, and after a few pages of submitting to its spell you realise that every single sentence is about to make you burst out laughing – although examining them in isolation, it's not always clear why. Apparently she wrote this in three weeks. I hate her, but I want more, more, more.
    • 5/5
      Zink gave me a great read, just enough of a challenge to keep me reading through the complexities of the characters and plot. Some passages took more than one run through, but that was my fault, not the author's. In the end I wanted to read more from her.
    • 3/5
      This book barely gets three stars. I am torn between thinking this book was really great and that it is total crap. Some parts I really, really liked. Sometimes the pretentious ramblings made me want to fling it across the room. All in all, I could have done without.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the edginess and quirkiness of the characters and their accepting and adulterous lifestyle. Honest and solid writing. Awaiting the next one.
    • 2/5
      started off well but I soon lost interest. It seemed well written, but was too unfocused.