But “gut-wrenching” is also the fittest way to describe Leni Zumas’s debut novel because she wants to wrench your gut, as literally as a gut can be wrenched. "In the classic sense of the term, THE LISTENERS is gut-wrenching in that it’s the story of a life haunted by adolescent trauma, of dreams cut brutally short-a story that involves a betrayal, an eating disorder and a stray bullet.
Not because the novel is messy-it isn’t-but because it contains the same rare combination of death, absurdity, and beauty, and a tempo slow enough to allow the reader full appreciation of all three." "Reading Leni Zumas’s debut novel THE LISTENERS puts one in mind of the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919. She reveals Quinn to us in circling episodes, deftly holding the character in the form of a smear of selfhood who doesn’t want to be entire…" Zumas’s effort to preserve that loss is stunningly successful. "Leni Zumas’s THE LISTENERS is a novel whose narrator, a thirtysomething bookstore manager and former singer named Quinn, orbits around the loss of her younger sister. Readers looking for gritty experimental fiction in the manner of the late Gilbert Sorrentino will find THE LISTENERS whetting their appetites for more from this promising new author." Zumas plays with narrative conventions here, peppering the text with short chapters that are at times ethereal and disjointed but often tinged with humor. A former anorexic and adolescent “cutter,” Quinn is smart, witty, and filled with obsession and anxiety over the events of her sister’s death and its aftermath. Fractured imagery, shifts in time and place, and a motley crew of characters-Fod, Quinn, Geck, and Cam, to name a few-lead the reader through a patchwork map of the marred childhood and failed adulthood of Quinn, a thirtysomething washed-up musician with a drinking problem. "Zumas’s debut novel reads a bit like Faulkner. Quinn’s perspective is fractured and unforgettable you’ll never see iPod headphones, among other things, the same way again." It’s also one of my favorite books of the year so far, a painful, sharply written story about a thirtysomething former musician, Quinn, dealing with the traumas of her past. "Leni Zumas’s first novel is so oddly eerie I couldn’t read it before bed, and so visceral I couldn’t read it over lunch. The French translation by Anne Rabinovitch, La Couleur du trois, was published by Presses de la Cité in January 2020. Powell's Indiespensable First Edition Club
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