THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER **SIGNED COPY**

New York, NY, U.S.A.: Ballantine, 1996. First edition, so stated, with complete number line beginning with 1. Fine in fine dust jacket, not price clipped, in protective mylar cover. SIGNED COPY, signature only, by the author on the title page. " You don't know what it's like to lose yourself. To have no words anymore, no way of saying who you are." So warns the anti-marriage, vengeful, divorced writer and theater artist Milly Xico, speaking to Perdita Halley, urging her not to give up her career in order to marry her lover, Dr. the Baron Alexander von Reisden. The talented 21-year-old Perdita, an aspiring concert pianist so nearsighted as to be almost blind, is determined to find out what she can accomplish in music. But her love for the Baron may be more of an impediment than her physical handicap. Set in the Paris of 1910, Smith's ambitious second novel (after The Vanished Child) opens with the Baron, a specialist in "mental disturbances," viewing the corpse of a murdered beggar woman to whom he was in the habit of giving alms. The Baron, haunted by the fact that he killed his abusive grandfather at age eight, feels empathy for the beggar woman's murderer, who begins writing to him not long after the body is found. Told in the alternating viewpoints of Perdita, Milly, the Baron, the murderer and a private detective from Massachusetts sent by Perdita's guardian to encourage the Baron to marry her, this is a sprawling, baroque tale of budding early feminism, murder and art forgery. Saturated with a subtle eroticism, low-key humor and luxuriant atmosphere, particularly concerning the great flood that ravaged the city of Paris early in the century." -- Publishers Weekly. 469 pages. Signed by Author. First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine/Fine. Book.