Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic

Book excerpt: "Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic is a compelling new volume in Hélène Cixous's search for lost time. Readers of earlier volumes-- Hemlock and Hyperdream, among others-- will reconnect with familiar characters: Eve, the elderly mother now in her hundredth year, Hélène, the daughter, who never expected to become a mother at 70, and the brother, childhood companion and rival. She has almost no time to write. ... Twists and Turns, like all Cixous's books, is a many-faceted text, whose narrative spins its webs in corners familiar to Cixous readers: corners with books and writers - Montaigne, Proust, Kafka, Derrida; a theater and plays; friendship, and love. It is a tale on the scale of Greek myth, about the inescapable entanglements of family relationships, that can lead one, in hyperbolic mode, to envision murder and suicide ... This is a tale with profoundly touching reversals."--Front book cover flap.