The Last of Her Kind (2005) by Sigrid Nunez

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last of Her Kind (2005)

by Sigrid Nunez

Manhattan, New York

Manhattan: 24/33

New York: 73/105

   Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award in 2018 for The Friend, about a writer who takes possession of a Great Dane after the suicide of a friend and mentor.  I was surprised when it won- having never heard of Nunez before (to my embarrassment, not to say she was in any way obscure.)  I read What You Are Going Through, her 2020 follow-up book, which is about an unnamed narrator who is asked to help her friend commit suicide.  After that, I went back read her 2010 book, Salvation City because it had a dystopia/post-apocalyptic setting. 

   

    I skipped The Vulnerables, her 2023 offering, because it didn't sound interesting, "Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past."

  Hard pass! Now four books in to the bibliography, before reading The Last of Her Kind I would have put Nunez on my "only if I have to" list, i.e. only if a book she publishes is a big hit, is nominated for a major award or is about a theme of particular interest to me.  After reading The Last of Her Kind I think I need to re-evaluate that position, because The Last of Her Kind is a genuine killer of a novel.   Again, the nature of the excellence of The Last of Her Kind is difficult to explain without major spoilers, but suffice it to say that it is far from the pedestrian 60's era bildungsroman it appears to be from the opening chapters.

  I put off reading this book for a month because of what I THOUGHT it was about, and once the plot kicked in I raced to complete it over the course of a single afternoon, like, I genuinely wanted to see how things turned out.  I wouldn't describe any of her other books this way, including the book set after the apocalypse.  Her other books aren't low stakes, exactly, but adhere more to the style of the European novel-of-ideas than the style of creating a satisfying plot for a general audience reader.