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74,000 words
Manuscript available Nov 2011
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ABOUT YASUKO THANH
(Photo: Courtesy of the author)
Yasuko Thanh is most recently the 2009 winner of the annual Journey Prize for the best short story published in Canada. In May 2012 McClelland and Stewart will release her story collection, Floating like the Dead. Yasuko has published her stories widely and travelled all over Europe and North America. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Victoria, British Columbia. Teddy’s Blow-Off Attraction is her first novel.
a novel by Yasuko Thanh
A NOVEL EXPLORING THE NATURE OF LOVE AND THE LENGTHS WOMEN WILL TO GO FOR IT, OR ITS FACSIMILE. IT LOOKS, TOO, AT THE EVER-EVOLVING DEFINITION OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN, AND HOW THE REST OF US RESPOND TO THOSE WHO DON’T CONFORM TO IT
- Author of "Floating Like the Dead", winner of the 2009 Journey Prize for the best short story published in Canada
Not since Geek Love, Catherine Dunn’s extraordinary 1989 novel about carnival life, has a freak show been used so effectively as a barometer of the human condition. Based on the true story of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican woman known variously as Ape Woman, Bear Woman, and The Bearded Lady, Yasuko Thanh’s novel takes us inside the life of a nineteenth-century international celebrity named Malipa Espinosa, whose face and body were covered entirely with hair. Petite and shapely but with an ape-like visage, Malipa toured the U.S., U.K., and Europe, singing and dancing exquisitely with her face obscured by a veil. She was her manager Teddy Lent’s blow-off attraction: the grand finale of his carny show. It ended with the removal of her veil.
In the age of Darwin, Julia Pastrana came to be seen as the missing link between apes and humans. What little is known about her is summarized in one chapter in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities by Jan Bondeson (1997). Through the fictional treatment of Julia’s story, Yasuko Thanh explores the nature of love and the lengths that women will go to for it, as well as the ever-evolving definition of what it means to be human, and how the rest of us respond to those who don’t conform to it. In Teddy’s Blow-Off Attraction, we watch Teddy Lent come to truly care for his charge, in spite of the fact that his exploitation of her was his only means of support, even after her death. In the novel his guilty conscience drives him mad, but by the time of his own death he achieves reconciliation with the ghost of the woman he called “The Nondescript.”
Teddy’s Blow-Off Attraction will resonate with everyone who has ever felt like a freak. It stands to reach at least as large an audience as Lori Lansens’ recent internationally successful novel about conjoined twins, The Girls.
Praise for Floating Like the Dead, to be published April 2012 by McClelland & Stewart’s Emblem Editions imprint
“Using artfully simple language, Thanh has crafted a story of powerfully resonant emotion with tremendous restraint – a gift that respects both her characters and her readers.” — Journey Prize jury citation