Motion Sickness - Softcover

Praise for Motion Sickness "A close reading [of Tillman] yields just how much her characters do want to connect, while preserving the right to their own process of intellection, the life of the mind. Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness and Absence Makes the Heart are nothing if not testaments to the belief that presenting the quality of one's mind in public is a means of connecting to others beside the self. In scenes of degradation, annihilation or joy, she contends with the idea that one's thoughts and gestures, while seemingly at odds, are married... attempts to accept the other not as a mirror but as a self." -- Hilton Als, Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1991 "Literature is a quirky thing and just when you start to believe it actually has been used up, along comes a writer, Lynne Tillman, whose work is so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings..." -- Los Angeles Reader "A firsthand account of one woman's European journey and a riveting investigation of the troublesome notion of 'national identity,' Motion Sickness has true intellectual originality, a gorgeously sly dry irony, and a rich cast of thinkers and drinkers and eccentrics and hoods." - Patrick McGrath "This is Jack Kerouac's On the Road rewritten by the opposite sex in the form of vignettes of far-flung places and implausible encounters... Impressions, associations, and bits of conversation jotted during lulls in a mostly manic itinerary, coalesce into a densely descriptive narrative. The result is a keen portrayal of the postmodern world...." -- Ginger Danto, Entertainment Weekly "This is Jack Kerouac's On the Road rewritten by the opposite sex " -- Entertainment Weekly "An intense and personal narrative. People and events are approached obliquely and never fully explained, as if we might know them already. This lean book is a welcome change after the baroque excesses of much contemporary fiction. Recommended for sophisticated readers." -- Library Journal "Lynne Tillman's Motion Sickness helped change my conception of what a novel could be... Riotously funny." -- Robert Marshall

For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels, art, strangers, books, and movies. Adrift in Europe in the late 1980s, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she's befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, who may be following her. In Paris, she discovers Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting "Las Meninas." In Barcelona, she is befriended by two generations of Germans, pre- and post-World War 2. She tours the hill towns of Italy, in a London taxi, with two surprising Englishmen, brothers in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. And everywhere she goes she collects postcards.