A TIME and NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR * New York Times Notable Book and Times Critic’s Top Book of 2018 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY * Elle * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub* NPR * O, The Oprah Magazine * Shelf Awareness The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday, hailed as “extraordinary” by The New York Times, “a brilliant and complex … novel by Lisa Halliday, hailed as “extraordinary” by The New York Times, “a brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war” by The Wall Street Journal, and “a literary phenomenon” by The New Yorker.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, “Folly,” tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, “Folly” also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, “Madness” is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.
A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is “a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas, and a politically engaged work of metafiction” (The New York Times Book Review), and a “masterpiece” in the original sense of the word” (The Atlantic). Lisa Halliday’s novel will captivate any reader with while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.
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Asymmetry is clever from start to finish. We open with Mary-Alice, a character who seems so empty that she finds meaning through loving others. And then we meet Amar, who in contrast is so full of memories and experiences he seems close to bursting.
As we learn the connection between the two stories, the beauty of Asymmetry is obvious. The lyrical writing and complex characters make this book unforgettable — highly recommended!
Asymmetry is a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy. Lisa Halliday writes with tender laugh-aloud wit, but under her formidable, reckoning gaze a world of compelling characters emerges. She steps onto the literary stage with the energy of a debut novelist and the confidence of a mature writer.
This novel requires a willingness to read closely, to pay attention to detail. Not in the sense of memorizing names and places, though. There are three sections, and it’s easy to think that the first two are unconnected novellas. They are not. The third section, in which a primary character from the first section is featured again, gives significant clues to the relationship between the first and second parts, but there are also clear clues in the middle section. This makes the book–which looks at the various ways in which significant relationships may be unequal or asymmetrical (age, power, weath, birthplace, etc.) –an intellectually rewarding read. It’s also an engaging story, brilliantly constructed and beautifully written.
Its odd sandwich form, like most of its characters, is intriguing. This is one of those philosophical novels that reads as simply as snap-peas. The conversations between Amal Jaafari and Alistair Blunt about war and civilization are both breezy and brilliant. I have recommended this book to all my reader friends.
OK, I seem to be on a rough run, review-wise, and it’s starting to wear on me. This is yet another book that I thought sounded so interesting and that turned out to lose me COMPLETELY… I will grant that the book was original – I have not read anything like it. I will grant that Halliday is a strong writer – there were some very lovely (and some equally disturbing) sections in the text that were resonant and poignant and pointed and sharply spot-on. But I can’t grant that this was a success for me, overall, because I never felt like I understood why the three pieces were all in one book…
Asymmetry. I get the concept. But the “new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda” never found their way to me, I guess, because I finished the book with a gigantic crease in my brow and absolutely no sense as to what I was supposed to have gleaned from flipping through all the preceding pages… The tales were readable on their own. If they’d been billed as separate but somewhat related, I might have bought this as a book of stories set in the same world. But they weren’t billed as such, they were billed as a novel, and a novel has to have some coherence throughout to succeed as a novel for me…
This may be another of those House of Leaves instances where the point is not so much the story as the art and cleverness of it all. (I didn’t get HoL either.) That’s fine, and probably resonates with others mightily. It just does not with me…
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.
Not a book for me. Did not finish
Lisa Halliday’s debut novel starts like a story you’ve heard, only to become a book unlike any you’ve read. The initial mystery is how its pieces fit together; the lasting one is how she pulled the whole thing off. Deft, funny, and humane, Asymmetry is a profoundly necessary political novel about the place for art in an unjust world.
Wow. Asymmetry is a rare book in the sense that it is always shocking to read something this good and polished and fully formed, a novel that impossibly seems to be everything at once: transgressive and intimate and expansive, torn from today’s headlines, signifier of the strange moment we now occupy. Somehow this book, this author has all but exploded into the world, fully formed. Lisa Halliday is an amazing writer. Just open this thing, start at the beginning.
Amazing. Ms. Halliday has a unique ability to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. I’m struggling to think of a novel that has had a similar effect on me. Asymmetry is funny, sad, deeply humane, and clearly the product of bold intelligence at work.
This book thinks itself very clever, when it is, in fact, quite tedious.
First story good, rest garbage.
Awful
Like many readers, I found part I engaging, part II overfilled with the author’s political diatribes, and part III just a drag.
Very interesting
Very well written. The characters are not ones I indentify with easily, but I came to like them and worry about them!
I absolutely adored this novel. It’s fascinating, clever, wildly imaginative, stunning, remarkable. At first you think it’s just a really good read, but when all the pieces come together, it takes your breath away.
A wonderfully inventive book which is asymmetrical in several ways. One of my favorite books of the year.
ASSYMETRY is aptly named, divided as it is between the relationship of a twenty-something and an old codger of a writer and an Iraqui immigrant. I enjoyed the banter of the young woman and the writer and the New York setting (I like anything that takes me back to New York), but then the story veers abruptly to the travails of the immigrant stuck in an airport. The reader is left to pretty much figure it out, but, all in all, it’s an interesting ride.
The unusual relationships and circumstances portrayed in this book are rendered with such simple, clear language. The writing is beautiful and the intellectual connections are brilliant. I particularly enjoyed the story in the first half of the book.
Three parts go together but how, what the connection and what makes it so assymetrical? That’s the unusual read…the authors fling with a famous writer, a Muslim traveling and getting stopped in the airport and music a writer identifies with. Enjoy the puzzle and writing