The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

April 27, 2015
A 34-year-old divorcée takes a 10-day vacation in Casablanca and, after her backpack is stolen, decides to shed her identity, a decision that releases her into the streets of Morocco and the depths of her own past. With her fourth novel, Vida (The Lovers) returns to familiar themes of identity and recovery, concerns that are well suited to stories about traveling abroad. Suspicious of her hotel and the police after the robbery, the woman takes advantage of a clerical error and commandeers another American’s identity: Sabine Alyse. With Sabine’s credit cards, she checks into the Hyatt, where a large film production has taken over the hotel, and soon makes friends with the famous actress starring in the movie. Written in the second person, the novel invites the reader to experience the protagonist’s separation firsthand. And as the woman’s situation becomes more complicated and her actions increasingly brazen, bits of her past are teased out. The result is an emotional and formally clever exploration of identity. Vida’s descriptive powers and restraint help to avoid the repetitive hammering of you that bogs down most second-person novels. Hard-boiled and inventive, the book takes a bold swing at mixing genres.

Starred review from May 15, 2015
What horror is the narrator fleeing as she boards a flight from Miami to Casablanca? Vida's (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, 2007; The Lovers, 2010) third elegant novel about a solitary, wounded young American woman on a dangerous quest in a foreign land is a gorgeously slippery and covertly cosmic tale about identity, theft, and recovery. As this brooding traveler is checking into her modest hotel, her brand-new backpack is stolen. The ensuing investigation is an absurd tangle of deception and corruption, inducing our besieged narrator to go to another hotel and assume another name. She turns out to be a twin, a strong swimmer, and quite a chameleon. When a famous American movie star on a shoot needs a stand-in, Vida's protagonist is summarily recruited, and her stint as a body double quickly engenders ever-deepening complications and risks. When she idly opens a book of poems by the Sufi mystic, Rumi, and reads The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty and once we learn the truth about her sorrow, the full intricacy of Vida's brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being is dazzlingly unveiled. Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida's astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)