Bitter Water Opera A novel

A woman adrift is visited by the spirit of a reclusive dancer in this enchanting debut novel from Polek (after the collection Imaginary Museums). Gia, fresh from a breakup and on leave from her job at a college film department, writes a letter to the late Marta Becket after stumbling upon photos of her in a library archive. In response, Marta, who painted and performed mostly in solitude in an abandoned opera house, mysteriously appears at Gia's house. Together, the two attend a ballet, visit the estate of a local painter, and watch The Red Shoes. After Marta paints herself into a mural in Gia's garage, she disappears, and Gia moves on to a stint tending to a former professor's cottage. Strange things occur on the grounds: Gia encounters a dead deer in the pond, and, while walking in a field, she feels crushed by a large, shapeless darkness. Later, while visiting Marta's opera house in Amargosa, Calif., Gia has a profound spiritual experience during a drive through Death Valley and feels "God's touch." Polek writes with an enjoyably strange spareness and the descriptions are often pleasantly odd: "Marta made me spaghetti for lunch. I curtsied before she sat down. She didn't notice." Readers will be eager to see where Polek goes next. Agent: Alex Reubert, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Apr.)

In Polek's debut novel, a woman fastens herself to reality through the spectral projection of a creative icon. Gia is floundering against a deepening depression: She's on leave from the college where she teaches and is recovering from a breakup that is, by her account, entirely her fault. Then she writes a letter to Marta Becket, a (real-life) artist, dancer, choreographer, and actress who died in 2017. She's read Marta's memoir and writes: "I wonder if you, too, are able to see my life in full, and could be brought down to attend to it." She mails the letter with a watercolor in place of an address. A week later, Marta is on her porch wearing lime-green shoes, conjured by her imagination. The intensity of Marta's convictions and accomplishments awes Gia--her life and passions seem incredibly grand, nothing like the modest ripples of Gia's mother and grandmother. Marta quietly cares for Gia, offering distraction, completing household tasks, and turning her gaze to art, but still this is not enough for Gia to "leave the things that make [her] small." She strikes out alone, first to a cottage in some indistinct woods and then to Death Valley, where Marta's most gleaming relic, the opera house she breathed into life, still stands. Polek creates striking, high-contrast images of each place Gia floats, half-tethered to her worldly connections and responsibilities. Though she has one eye trained on "the despairing antipossibility of [her] past" and one on "the possible despair in [her] future," her narration burnishes each thing she encounters, collects, considers, and leaves to rot in her present: "a deer, with its eyes eaten away by fish," a "small crooked pear tree," "rabbit stew with mushrooms." Gia stumbles into healing like a fawn, but her breathtaking sensitivity makes this rebirth story worthwhile. As all quotations and biographical details attributed to Marta are genuine, the novel also acts as an introduction to the life of a fascinating artist. A delightfully peculiar meditation on imagination--as maladaptive crutch, creative tool, and steppingstone to peace. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.