Unspeakable Things

Written by Kathleen Spivack

Narrated by Suzanne Toren

The setting: New York, the early 1940s, with the spectre of a red-hot Europe at war.

At the center of Kathleen Spivack’s Unspeakable Things: Anna (known as the Rat), an exotic Hungarian countess with the face of an angel, beautiful eyes and a seraphic smile, with a passionate intelligence, an exquisite ugliness, and the power to enchant…Her second cousin Herbert, a former minor Austrian civil servant who believes in Esperanto and the international rights of man, a wheeler-dealer in New York, powerful in the social sphere, yet under the thumb of his wife, Adeline…Michael, their missing homosexual son…Felix, a German pediatrician who dabbles in genetic engineering…The Tolstoi String Quartet, four men and their instruments, who for twenty years lived as one, playing the great concert halls of Europe, for whom music is their life; escaping to New York from Bremerhaven, smuggled out on a German submarine, their money sewn into the red silk linings of their instrument cases.…

And watching them all, Herbert’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Maria, witnessing the family’s strange comings and goings, being regaled at night when most are asleep with the intoxicating, thrilling stories of their secret pasts…of lives lived in St. Petersburg…of husbands being sent to the front and large, dangerous debts owed to the tsar of imperial Russia, and of a strange pact made in desperation between the Rat and the mystic faith healer Grigori Rasputin, their meeting night after night in Rasputin’s apartments, and the spell-binding, unspeakable things done there in the name of penance and pleasure.…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781511334167

Kathleen Spivack

Kathleen Spivack is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She teaches in Boston and Paris.

Reviews for Unspeakable Things

[seeword · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Spivack dares to speak about the terrible things people do to one another. The telling is sometimes poetic, sometimes mythic, and often uncomfortably graphic and realistic. Hard material but well worth reading. Library book.

[cathgilmore · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Much has been made of the "unspeakable things" in this novel and yes, there is a doctor who abuses not only children but their mothers and all remain silent. Beyond that very clear story line, the rest of Unspeakable Things is simply too muddled to keep my attention. Musicians who believe their instruments to be alive and hold them more dear than they do their wives? A wife driven insane because? Spivack takes obliqueness to new levels. I don't need graphic depictions of horror, not at all, but I need to understand what an author is trying to say through their words and this is far too difficult in Unspeakable Things. Instead, things move at a sludge-y pace so that by 3/4 I had lost interest in whatever was being conveyed.