GET LIT: Win a copy of Maile Chapman's Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

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GET LIT: Win a copy of Maile Chapman's Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

POSTED: Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 6:29 PM

Graywolf, 256 pp., $23, Mar. 30

This afternoon's Book Quarterly Trivia Week giveaway, Maile Chapman's debut novel, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, is nothing if not a mouthful. Here's Katherine Hill's take on the book, which appeared in Thursday's Book Quarterly reviews section:

Maile Chapman's debut novel makes a great case for commanding titles. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto — yikes! The very words induce a chill, but at the same time beckon the reader in, deep into the snowy Finnish countryside, to Suvanto, an early-20th-century convalescent hospital, where Finnish and American women rest their troubled bodies and minds. No surprise, all is not well at Suvanto. The patients can be difficult, and often inscrutable, as they band together against their caretakers, unsettling even Sunny Taylor, the consummate nurse, who has escaped troubles of her own in America. With the arrival of a particularly unruly patient named Julia, and an American gynecologist harboring progressive ambitions, the atmosphere of Suvanto, already laden with institutional anxiety, becomes almost impossible to control. "One danger of constant observation," Chapman writes ominously, "is that all the world, even tragedy, comes to seem anecdotal." In our post-feminist times, we tend to romanticize women's liberation or else ignore it altogether, but Chapman's eerie (if at times aloof) novel reminds us of the personal pains endured on that road to progress — and the roaring silence of the female body just before it found its voice.

To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:

What famous novelist is quoted as saying Maile Chapman is one of his "favorite writers"?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net, and don't forget to check back to Critical Mass tomorrow for Book Quarterly Trivia Week's grand finale.

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