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Books

All change: everything metamorphoses in Aquarium, including its author, who takes on the persona of a 12-year-old girl

Fish become humans, humans fish in the fairy-tale world of David Vann’s poetic novel, Aquarium

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

Aquarium David Vann

Heinemann, pp.266, £18.99

Books ought to be able to stand on their own, but perhaps it is important to know this about David Vann: a year after his stepmother’s mother had shot her husband and herself, his father also shot himself. Vann was 13 years old. The reason it’s important to know this is that what might seem implausible in the author’s new novel, Aquarium, probably does not at all seem like that to him.

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