Casper, Claudia 1957(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1957, in Canada; married; children: two.

ADDRESSES: Home—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Agent—Anne McDermid and Associates Ltd., 92 Willcocks St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1C8.

CAREER: Freelance typesetter and writer. Appeared on the radio program Morningside, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1996.

WRITINGS:

The Reconstruction (novel), Penguin Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1996, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

The Continuation of Love by Other Means (fiction), Penguin Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Also author of short stories.

ADAPTATIONS: The novel The Reconstruction has been optioned for development as a film.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A collection of short stories.

SIDELIGHTS: Claudia Casper managed to get her first novel published after three Canadian publishers went through a bidding war to obtain publishing rights. The author credits her success, in part, to a concise and effective query letter she sent to carefully selected publishers. The novel, The Reconstruction, concerns Margaret, a sculptor who looks at her disheveled life while sculpting a life-sized likeness of Lucy, an ancient skeleton thought to be one of the original humans. Margaret is recovering from the breakup of a ten-year marriage to an emotionally unavailable man. On the brink of financial despair, she takes the job to reconstruct the skeleton of Lucy and finds herself imagining what Lucy's life had been like.

Patricia Ross, writing in the Library Journal, observed how Casper uses "the detailed reconstruction of Lucy as a metaphor for the re-creation of Margaret's life." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that in The Reconstruction, "Casper avoids easy answers and writes bravely about our need to place ourselves in history in order to make sense of our existence." Maclean's contributor Barbara Wickens claimed that Casper writes effectively about Margaret's depression without managing to depress the reader. Wickens wrote: "A large part of Margaret's appeal is that even in her misery, her imagination is startlingly vivid." The reviewer concluded that the novel "establishes the foundation of a brilliant new literary career for Casper."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1997, p. 817.

Books in Canada, May, 1996, p. 35.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1996, p. 1548.

Library Journal, January, 1997, Patricia Ross, review of The Reconstruction, p. 144; September 15, 1997, p. 128.

Maclean's, February 19, 1996, p. 12; March 25, 1996, Barbara Wickens, review of The Reconstruction, p. 58.

New York Times Book Review, March 2, 1997, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, November 11, 1996, review of The Reconstruction, pp. 56-57.

Quill and Quire, February, 1996, p. 33.