- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (21 Mar 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 033041321X
- ISBN-13: 978-0330413213
- Product Dimensions: 22 x 14.4 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,330,094 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Alva & Irva
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Playwright Edward Carey's novel Alva & Irva is a spirited, inventive tale with a vein of half-ironic sadness running through it that brings to mind the works of other European masters of this genre, namely Günter Grass, Italio Calvino and Milan Kundera. Named for twin girls who create a plasticine model of their small European city, Alva & Irva is in part the life story of these eccentric twins and also a guidebook to the fictional city of Entralla. Entralla is a place so like countless small, undistinguished cities in Europe (right down to its invented brush with history--a rumour that Napoleon had spent a night there) that one could probably use Alva & Irva as an actual guidebook, standing in any number of piazzas, plazas and squares, and glancing around at the cafés, cathedrals, chapels, post offices and municipal buildings. Sometimes Carey overreaches and the quirks of his characters become merely cute. When he rises above this, his attention to detail and his playful prose are a delight. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Bill Greenwell in Independent, April 2003
I promise: you will enjoy Edward Carey's brilliant second novel, if you give it a chance.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Alva & Irva is a deliciously quirky novel - it takes the form of a (fake) travel guide/history to the city Entralla (fictional city, I should say) and the autobiographical writings of Alva Dapps. She describes her upbringing and closeness to Irva - and later her longings for separation and exploration. At the same time, Irva becomes more and more withdrawn, quiet and reclusive. As Irva refuses to leave the house, and Alva wishes both to explore and to tempt her away, they start a joint project: Alva walks through all the streets of Entralla taking measurements, photos, drawings - from which Irva makes a plasticine model of the city.
It all sounds faintly ridiculous, I daresay, but somehow the book really works - it is a novel filled with grotesque characters (in the sense of exaggerated and strange) - the father who is obsessed with stamps, for example. The novel is actually, in many ways, about obsession - whether with objects or people or tasks. Obsession and exaggeration - the events I've described are amongst the more normal. Wait til you find out what Alva gets tattooed on herself.
In amongst all the glorious absurdity, I discovered a very moving narrative. Perhaps my love of twin-lit made me read a little too much into it, but I found the breaking of Alva and Irva's close bond incredibly touching, as Alva sought others and Irva couldn't understand why, and their responses to this.
It's so difficult to suggest which readers might like Alva & Irva because Carey's novel is so utterly unlike anything else I've read. Sometimes the black humour is a little Saki-esque, and the cover quotation claims it has similarities with Kafka, but I've not read any. Anyone who enjoys the quirky and unusual, and of course anyone with my love of twin-lit, would enjoy a wander into Carey's world. It's not a journey you'll take anywhere else.
It all sounds faintly ridiculous, I daresay, but somehow the book really works - it is a novel filled with grotesque characters (in the sense of exaggerated and strange) - the father who is obsessed with stamps, for example. The novel is actually, in many ways, about obsession - whether with objects or people or tasks. Obsession and exaggeration - the events I've described are amongst the more normal. Wait til you find out what Alva gets tattooed on herself.
In amongst all the glorious absurdity, I discovered a very moving narrative. Perhaps my love of twin-lit made me read a little too much into it, but I found the breaking of Alva and Irva's close bond incredibly touching, as Alva sought others and Irva couldn't understand why, and their responses to this.
It's so difficult to suggest which readers might like Alva & Irva because Carey's novel is so utterly unlike anything else I've read. Sometimes the black humour is a little Saki-esque, and the cover quotation claims it has similarities with Kafka, but I've not read any. Anyone who enjoys the quirky and unusual, and of course anyone with my love of twin-lit, would enjoy a wander into Carey's world. It's not a journey you'll take anywhere else.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
ENTRALLA(ING)!
15 Mar 2008
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Describing this book is similar to describing being a parent to someone who isn't. There are many words that can be used, but none of them are sufficient. The Amazon description above tells all you want to know of the story before reading it (maybe too much).
Poignant is the closest I can come to explaining the tone of the book, but all is not as sad as that term might suggest. The twin sisters are unbelievably well portrayed by Carey. Alva's the want-to-be worldly one and Irva is scared of and by the world. Their interactions with each other and with their (ficitonal) town make up the story.
I had to look more than once at the picture of the author on the jacket. I could have sworn most of the book was written by someone much older. That isn't an "-ism" of any kind; there are some things in this world that can usually be described only by someone of a certain age and experience. I was amazed that he was born in 1970. I was also surprised many times that he is a "he" and not a "she" in his presentation of the sisters.
There are some blanks left for the reader to fill in. Sometimes this doesn't work well in a book, but in this case it adds to the pleasure. Like his Observatory Mansions, it's all about the people. Please read this book. It is a one of a kind.
Poignant is the closest I can come to explaining the tone of the book, but all is not as sad as that term might suggest. The twin sisters are unbelievably well portrayed by Carey. Alva's the want-to-be worldly one and Irva is scared of and by the world. Their interactions with each other and with their (ficitonal) town make up the story.
I had to look more than once at the picture of the author on the jacket. I could have sworn most of the book was written by someone much older. That isn't an "-ism" of any kind; there are some things in this world that can usually be described only by someone of a certain age and experience. I was amazed that he was born in 1970. I was also surprised many times that he is a "he" and not a "she" in his presentation of the sisters.
There are some blanks left for the reader to fill in. Sometimes this doesn't work well in a book, but in this case it adds to the pleasure. Like his Observatory Mansions, it's all about the people. Please read this book. It is a one of a kind.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A beautiful book about place.
28 Sep 2003
Format:Hardcover
This is a story of place. And it is one I found particularly touching. You will feel the same if you've ever walked aimlessly through a city's streets as you wondered what it would be like to live there, or - if you lived there - wondered what it would be to leave. Edward Carey has found the perfect metaphors for the alternate yearnings, to stay or go, in his characters Irva and Alva. But reducing them to symbols would be unfair. The warmth of Carey's writing prevents that. The real brilliance of his story, though, lies in how he manages to illuminate every emotional aspect of how we regard the places we are and may go, and he does so in such an unforced and natural way that we've hardly realized the depth of his contemplation by the book's end. His touch is light, but the feeling is strong.
The context of a guidebook for the unreal city of Entralla, complete with a street map and a recommended tour, frames the diary of Alva, the identical twin of Irva. As the twins grow up, they grow increasingly apart. Alva longs to travel and Irva turns inward. Alva's threat to leave her sister and their city plays out as the essential betrayal of anyone wanting to abandon their home. But Alva finds a reason to stay a while as she attempts to turn her sister from the retreat into herself, the smallest place there is. They take on the task of miniaturizing the city in plasticine; Alva documents the outside in photographs and measurements while Irva remains inside and sculpts. The tiny buildings "may not have been mathematically accurate, but they were, let there be no doubt about this, emotionally precise." It is emotional accuracy that matters.
"Miniature things move people." In Carey's world and in real life, it is because the perspective granted by things reduced focuses the emotions we associate with those things. Occasionally we are even made aware of the hundreds of other lives happening immediately around us. When Alva's and Irva's sculpture is reluctantly displayed to a scarred populace, both the smallness and the significance of the peoples' lives are somehow simultaneously grasped. These oppositions of place are difficult to hold in the same hand.
When the writer of this guidebook is revealed, the significance of small lives is once again emphasized and along with it the unavoidable bitterness of travelling alone in a vast world. This final revelation is devastating and beautiful in a novel full of contradictions. I don't ever expect to read any other book that so perfectly evokes my own feelings towards the places I have been.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
What can I say?! Carey can't falter!
7 Aug 2003
Format:Hardcover
Carey's first book, Observatory Mansions, already had me waiting on the edge of my seat for the next one. Alva & Irva did not let me down. His characters are once again lacking in sanity, and as the book progresses, so does this trait. I would say Alva and Irva is a little more solemn than Carey's first novel, but certainly a good read. The last portion had me talking out loud and murmuring, "Oh god. Oh my God. Oh no!" You don't believe the lengths the characters go to to secure themselves against their fears and angers until you are on to the next shock. I am certainly eager for Carey's third.
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