ABSTRACT IBD

Sinopse

Cora Freelene lives with her cat, Chloe, in her dead great-grandmotherâÇÖs house. SheâÇÖs been given a year to prepare the house for sale - to clear out every room and dispose of decades worth of accumulated odds and ends. With only six weeks left, she has made very little progress, instead spending her time inventing a sordid ancestral past, moving things pointlessly from one place to another, engaging in futile office romances, and obsessing over an aloof video store clerk who mostly ignores her.áCora is twenty-six at the dawn of the millennium, and though sheâÇÖs too unaware to notice, her job writingáabstractsáof Congressional hearing transcripts offers her glimpses into a very different future than the past she encounters in great-grandmotherâÇÖs house.áAs the clock ticks on her living arrangements, and as September 11thácomes and goes, CoraâÇÖs self-absorption leads her down a rabbit hole of anxiety -- that great-grandmotherâÇÖs house is eating her alive, that her office mates are oblivious to a reality only she can see, that the video store clerk is purposely taunting her, and worst of all, that something terrible will happen to her beloved Chloe.From Sarah DâÇÖStair (author ofáHelen BonaparteáandáCentral Valley)ácomesáAbstract,áa claustrophobic examination of a young psyche lost within an alienated,áfractured, and cluttered world. Perhaps oneâÇÖs only defense is to reduce the disorder to its most compact linguistic form. Perhaps, however, the lonely world retaliates by abstracting us back.