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Estate Sale By Mia Dalia Read DaliaVerse Available now
Mia Dalia’s debut novel ‘Estate Sale’ is brimming with talent and intelligence. There’s a diversity of styles, voices, themes, as well as time periods and perspectives on life, death, love, and history. This stunning variety is not forced on the story; on the contrary, holding everything together is a sort of love story, the journey of a married couple of Russian emigres through place and history. The husband is obsessed with magick, horror fiction, and the occult; the wife, a very mysterious personality, sophisticated and wise beyond her years (and whose origins are not revealed till the last few pages of the novel), follows her wealthy husband around Europe, ending up in the US after several decades. Their wanderings throughout Europe gives them to chance to meet several well-known personages of the occult in the 20th century (Crowley and Blavatsky, for instance), artists and intellectuals as well; this allows Dalia to naturally drop some very interesting and quite subtle details concerning the story, preparing the ground for the couple’s stay in the US. This narrative is certainly gothic in character. I’m still at a loss to explain how Dalia managed to avoid populating her novel with those terrible info-dumps, having to explain everything to her readers. The perfect, effortlessly balanced pacing and the nuanced, multilayered story of the couple’s married life is fascinating, at times a slow burn, often very fast and a bit disturbing. However, this is just one plotline in the novel – admittedly, the most important one. The husband keeps collecting historically significant objects, and when the time comes to leave this plane of existence, his wife inherits the collection, and when her time comes to go, the collection is sold at their estate sale. Neither the buyers nor we the readers realized that these innocent-looking objects, ranging from a typewriter to a telephone, have been imbued with magick; and Dalia intersperses her main story with short tales about what happens to the buyers (or anyone who interacts afterwards with the objects) once they’ve acquired, unawares, the item. The varied personalities involved provide the diversity mentioned above, in voices and themes. These tales are original, unsettling, sometimes horrific but also bright and hopeful, though it’s impossible to avoid the feeling that these items are sinister, perhaps wholly evil; dealings with them always threatening to go Faustian. Dalia’s treatment of magick considers it as something atavistic and ancient, something that goes beyond the rules and the desires of humanity. To conclude, I might add that though this is a very gentle story (is there a better adjective to describe Dalia’s prose?), it's also insightful and perfect for readers with a penchant for detail. I was enthralled with this little jewel of a book. Recommended!
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