As much art film as a book, this slow-to-unfold novel has as many long conversations (often accompanied by long walks) and deep thinking about the meanings of life and love and art as storyline and plot development. Penny Bell is a brilliant 17-year-old musician living in New York City and writing music that uses emotionally-manipulative Extra-Low Frequency sound waves when she simultaneously discovers that her neighbor, an aging dancer named Ula obsessed with immortality, took Penny's music for use in her own work, and that Ula's apartment was broken into. Then Ula takes off, so Penny and a dubious character named Alessandro fly to Paris to find her. Most of the characters -- themselves mostly artists of one sort of another -- are living breathing flesh, but what follows is a surreal, almost disconnected series of episodes where occasionally the plot advances but amid a lot of descriptive touring of Paris and Rome, long-winded talks, sprinkles of untranslated French, and a sinister German doctor named Zut whose speaks in a distractingly phonetic accent. There are gems scattered throughout, including a cathartic moment where Ula's "immortality" is erased. But overall the book has the feel of fitting tightly into a niche, like a black-and-white avant garde film exploring light and shadow as much as human nature. -- manuscript review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization

- January 18, 2010Publishers Weekly Review