Anyway, Arthur Phillips has shown he likes to write mysteries. Not of the whodunit kind, but of a deeper, where is the truth when everyone can see only their own experience of the truth? variety. Even in his first novel, Prague, he employs multiple viewpoints to get at a wider sense of expat Budapest. (Siel has been reading about subjective reality too.)
In Angelica, Phillips goes all out - and shows how entirely people create their own truths. And with each retelling (there are 3 1/2) of the haunting of the little girl and her mother - possibly by the spectral manifestation of the father's sexual appetite - sympathies shift and misunderstandings are laid bare. And still any objective truth remains elusive. As a grown Angelica finally laments:
If each of the players performed his own unconnected drama, then it is only in the intersection of those dramas that my life can be seen, through the latticed spaces where light can pass between three stories laid over each over. And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains. All my knowledge consumes itself.
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