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Bitter Water Opera

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An electrifying debut novel about art, solitude, family, and faith in a world without it

In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2024

About the author

Nicolette Polek

3 books92 followers
Nicolette Polek is a fiction writer from Northeast Ohio. She is the recipient of a 2019 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, Spike Art Magazine, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. Nicolette holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland and an MAR from Yale Divinity School. She currently teaches at SUNY Purchase and Bennington College.

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5 stars
185 (39%)
4 stars
150 (31%)
3 stars
94 (20%)
2 stars
32 (6%)
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8 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
Profile Image for Annie Tate Cockrum.
159 reviews26 followers
February 23, 2024
My genre of choice is typically stream of consciousness narratives from the point of view of a woman living alone / in isolation. This book falls into that category and does it very well - kept me on my toes just enough and felt very tender. It reminded me of The Wall by Marlen Houshoffer, in the most positive way. Would recommend if you are in the market for a story about a woman who’s working through things.
Profile Image for n.
229 reviews83 followers
March 31, 2024
“The world was covered in pinholes to be peered in. Ideas emerging in precise places, containing endless opportunities for revelation.”
Profile Image for Meg.
68 reviews26 followers
July 23, 2024
yeahhhh baby this is what it’s all about.. god and love and essence and the desert
Profile Image for endrju.
323 reviews59 followers
April 21, 2024
Life comes from outside of time.

No.

Time wins over time.

No.

I felt tired by the wondrousness of her message.

Yes.
Profile Image for Lee.
557 reviews60 followers
September 18, 2024
I do tend to love fiction that illustrates Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existential despair - and its cure. In poetic prose, our narrator Gia is here encountered deep in despair. She would appear to be in the second of the three kinds of Kierkegaardian despair, not to will to be oneself. She is aware that she has a self independent of the finite, is deeply unsatisfied living only in the immediacy of the finite, but her pursuit of synthesis between the finite and the infinite, which could allow her self to shrug off its despair, is a confused and painful one. She first tries to find it in relation with other people; her romantic partnership crumbles as, finding it unsuited for purpose, she futilely tries to find it with still other people. Walking with a colleague, feeling a rush of connection,
There was a row of crab apple trees at the top of the trail, sturdy and mangled with age, and I climbed onto one of the lower branches to look out at the vista. He turned toward me to say something, and as he did, I caught his hand. I didn’t understand why. A thrilled impulse. He moved closer, as though this was intended all along. In an instant, the levity from our walk extinguished under irreversible fog. We stayed there pressing each other against the crab apple tree, until the bark dug into my back and the sun fell from dark orange to gray. I didn’t see him again, and crafted a series of lies to cover up the evening.


In the second part of the text she tries to find it alone in nature. She borrows a lush, isolated house from another colleague while on work leave. “I had long looked to fix my life through other people, so now, I considered, I could try fixing it alone.” At times while gardening and planting trees and existing in nature she feels buoyed and this is a great relief, but yet the despair still exists and pushes through.

Not even nature, in its stillness and silence, could pull me out of myself in any lasting way. Even after days when I was grateful to be surrounded by its complexity and beauty, and would experience weightlessness and relief, I would still retreat, hours later, within my rattled body, unable to bring nature inside. I turned to face myself and it failed. There was still a door in me, and I kept it shut.


It is in the third part of the text that she is able to finally open that door to the infinite. In the second part she had heard a preacher’s words, “Words don’t fall away and disappear, but form thought shapes, lead separate lives… blossom, or echo, clicking into meaning years later… Revelation finds its time.” At a hotel in the desert, memories of her mother’s faith now come to reach her. “A prayer felt stark and concrete, full of movement, like a kicking in the belly. I felt a tug toward God both in me like a speck of pollen, and outside me like a meadow, propagated by my mother’s many words that drifted around my life like pearls… What followed each prayer was silence, then desire or frustration. Sometimes I didn’t feel anything. Each ended with the same plea, awkwardly. God.

Then after a drive to Badwater, “the lowest point in the country”, she awkwardly prays and is fortunate enough to be granted a mystical vision:

A presence shook me; it was strong and wild, shattering enough to place at the front of something. I became small and unnoticeable, but it was a smallness where something wonderful surged around me. The smaller I became, the more I could see it. Like a fractaling reveal, tying my days together with a single thread. I crinkled down into the sand. I felt the squint the happens when one is staring directly into the sun, but it was my entire body squinting at love… The shock turned to ecstatic giddiness. Who could I tell this to? I thought. God’s touch!


Her self now grounded in God, able to form a synthesis of finite and infinite, she has overcome her despair through faith, what Kierkegaard described as “In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” This, religious faith, is the only way to overcome our despair, be it conscious or unconscious.

“I too had tried to preserve myself, but the object of preservation can never be the one to do the preserving. Life comes from outside of time… I thought I had nothing, but after long enough something emerged from bitter water - a mysterious thing that precedes itself, and continues past itself, a master of ceremonies who stands outside the beginning and end.”

A beautiful book, with Polek touchingly thanking in the acknowledgements “My mother for her faith, and God who supplies the strength to continue.”
Profile Image for Daniel.
384 reviews4 followers
July 17, 2024
A solid 4.5. What’s wild about this is that I read it on a whim and it heavily features a location that I happened to pass bye two years ago where I made my boyfriend turn the car around before we continued on just so I could get a picture of it. Now it feels like fate. This was a really good, introspective look at purpose, appreciation, and making meaning both out of art and of one’s own life.
Profile Image for William John Wither.
216 reviews4 followers
June 23, 2024
I think this is an exacting and precise book. It does what it sets out to do in sharp yet sparing prose. It, too, is an amalgam of its narrator--that of art, film, monomania, limerence, living. It is, truly, the line between delusion and faith. And this faith (as someone who has always been averse to religion) is handled with such care that, really, it is non-denominational. There is this 'leap of faith' which many writers (Camus, in particular) have lambasted others over, and yet here it is a calling from the trough that feels genuine. Other themes of preservation, solitude, yearning, grasping, and contradiction are both present and symbolic.

I think, if you're someone who's looking to write thinly-veiled fiction, this is a book worth reading because it showcases how to scope, scaffold, and make a work that's journey-led.
Profile Image for Ksenia.
93 reviews
April 28, 2024
There is actually such a thing as trying too hard and, in your attempts at sounding beautiful and profound, losing the heartbeat of the real, living truth you are trying to convey. What an insufferable little book.
Profile Image for Rachel.
318 reviews38 followers
September 12, 2024
3.75. This was a random library find and I really enjoyed spending an afternoon with it. It’s a quiet novel of a woman, Gia, on the precipice of change, post break-up and on leave from her job, and her attempts to, as cliche as it sounds, find herself, or maybe, to find peace within herself. She seems to be having the age old issue of: wherever you go, there you are.

Told through a series of vignettes over four sections, the first focuses on the story of Marta Becket, a real woman who, after breaking down in her car while traveling through Death Valley Junction, stumbled upon the Amargosa Opera House in disrepair and decided to never leave (it’s a fascinating story, look it up). The ghost of Marta is summoned by Gia and the spirit of the old woman comes to stay for a while. Though hopeful that Marta can ease her despair, it’s not enough.

The next two chapters see Gia temporarily moving to a remote cottage and then finally making the pilgrimage to the Amargosa Opera House. Both trips an attempt to bring the life and soul back into her “theater set” existence.

Gia’s resolution is one of finding God, but it’s not a preachy book and Gia’s journey of crawling out from inside herself to find connection with the greater world can be a relatable experience for any reader, religious or not.

Polek’s writing is poetic and gentle, it’s a quiet and introspective book that I absolutely recommend reading while alone and surrounded by nature (or by the lake if you’re a Chicago city dweller like I). It’s a book that’ll make you want to escape to the desert for a bit.
Profile Image for Nick Tomasello.
14 reviews
April 18, 2024
Gripping, brilliant stuff.. could of read another 100 pages, but it’s trim template will have me going back in the future. The kind of polished work you can indulge within a night and think about for long after. “if God exists outside of time does everything in the world happen at once?”
8 reviews1 follower
May 22, 2024
beautifully poetic, pleasantly boring, frustratingly in-cohesive
Profile Image for Claire.
39 reviews1 follower
August 1, 2024
to live as if living permanently, in a place where I am only temporarily
Profile Image for Tyler Proctor.
59 reviews17 followers
April 26, 2024
I am obviously partial to art with spiritual concerns, but I think this is a remarkable novel even without my bias. It cuts so close to the heart of modern malaise, of loneliness, of disenchantment that it only makes sense for the ghost(?) of Marta Beckett to show up as a saving symbol in the first pages, pointing ultimately to God who shows up as a saving reality in the last pages. It touches something undeniably true, even if you're unsure whether or not you believe it. It bears a resemblance to Jon Fosse in this way.
Profile Image for katherine.
93 reviews
September 22, 2024
4.5 stars
Very beautiful, prosaic writing with an uplifting message. A lot of gorgeous imagery, metaphors, and musings. Even if you don’t like the stream-of-consciousness, nothing-really-happens style of writing, I still think this is worth a read. There was quite a bit of discussion about religion towards the last third of the book which wasn’t handled indelicately but felt a little heavy-handed for my taste. Also, though the main character’s epiphany was well-placed and appropriate for the narrative journey, it felt like her melancholia was rectified kinda quickly and unrealistically. Overall, though, a pleasant experience. If not for those two things I would have given this 5 stars. Here’s some snippets:

“I was always in a world that didn’t even exist. My limerent life ran through my head in tandem with my real life, a daydream on steroids, which simultaneously pulsed with dopamine and deflated reality into something transparent and malnourished.”

“Those were blissful days. I lived as if I was living permanently, in a place where I was only temporary.”

(I’ll stop here because I don’t wanna give away too much of her writing, it��s better experienced in the context of the novel)
Profile Image for Laurynn.
29 reviews
September 25, 2024
This was absolutely gorgeous. Referential to the real-life Amargosa Opera House and Marta Becket, the ballerina that gave life to it, I really can't express how deeply I felt this. Nicolette Polek writes with this sort of poetic straightforwardness; every sentence is simple and purposeful, but none of them lack beauty.

Bitter Water Opera is about solitude and the creation of art and God and faith and time. The way that Polek writes feels as if you're walking through a desert, imbued with that intense feeling of loneliness and the vastness of the desert (and, at the same time, the vastness of life). It feels so expansive and yet also just so poignant and intentional, and I am absolutely in love with the writing. The plot is a meandering one, but it wonderfully highlights the journey of the protagonist, Gia, which is one of struggle and emptiness and eventual fulfillment.

Basically, this book was so wonderful and I'll probably never be done reading it or waxing poetic about its greatness.

"All of it, her life in objects, could be gone in a moment, through flood or fire, and they knew that well. Time wins over time. What survives materiality is a story." (pg 105)
Profile Image for Leanne.
716 reviews71 followers
June 24, 2024
A woman is at a dead end in her life. Something that has happened to us all maybe.... failed relationship and her career is also falling apart. At this juncture, she is called to the desert to follow in the footsteps of a ballerina who herself moved heaven and earth to move from NYC to Death Valley where she built an opera house in the desert. Fitzcarraldo anyone? A beautiful monument of futility.

It is interesting the way where a person falls down, that is where she finds her treasure... first in the charged objects of the story... and the beauty of the world.

an Audubon clock that played different bird calls on the hour
the superbloom in the desert

This is a book about paying attention to the world. And the treasure she finds is God.

An unexpected new novel published by Gray Wolf

July 23, 2024
4/5. Book Club Book.
Read in one day. At first didn’t think I was going to like this book the stream of consciousness was a bit confusing at first especially because I had no idea who Marta was at first or that the story is based on a real person. Once I got some of the background lore I also became obsessed with the Amargosa (I want to go there). The whole story almost feels like a fairytale and I loved the imagery of certain scenes like the rotting deer or desert flowers. Loved reading something as contemporary as this!

“Who have I become if not a bag of words”


To be a woman is to perform.

This kept coming into my mind while reading this book. Ballerinas are prime examples of existing to perform for the male gaze. I found it symbolic that Marta chooses to perform in the opera house to no one but herself after a hugely successful career in NY. To me she’s reclaiming her performance ie. life/discovering herself. Maybe this is what connects Gia and Marta.
5 reviews
April 18, 2024
I really enjoyed this book and I'm thankful to the author for sharing it.

The writing felt imaginative, calm, vulnerable, honest, compassionate, and curious.

Here are five of the many, many sentences I appreciated:

"I had turned over the details of the opera house for so long that to visit it became an act of remembering, the act of remembering an act of forgetting, the act of forgetting an active motion."

"It seemed to be a good sign that I saw a place for what it was."

"That this man, who grew up in an empty Texan town and never left it, had some sort of access to a place in the past through an amplification of the heart, in a way that could never have existed with the places he was blinded to by familiarity."

"Simple foods."

"I imagined his words as small, buoyant pearls, cast from the front of the chapel and out the propped-open windows, into the town, over the house and the high wall, some falling and settling onto the ground, falling into open windows of parked cars outside the market or into the potted soil at the nursery, breathed in and carried on clothes, waiting to be encountered and revealed."
Profile Image for bruna.
35 reviews
July 8, 2024
4,5⭐️

🎀 so coquette 🎀


and it was also exactly what I needed when I needed it. i can see how it can be boring or weird for others, but i think i had a Bitter Water Opera shaped hole in my heart and it filled it.
Profile Image for Vika Kareva.
62 reviews22 followers
April 10, 2024
A few thoughts for this quiet, but formidable meditation on noticing that probably isn’t on your radar.

Bitter Water Opera, divided into 3 parts and told in a series of vignettes, spans the months in the life of a deeply lonely woman trying to find a foothold in the world. While dealing with the ending of her romantic relationship, she attempts to interpret her life through the company of an artist she feels a kinship to, lose and find herself in seclusion, and pilgrimages out to the desert for whatever she might find there.

Often times the work is introspective and intimate; the writing and observations throughout reminding me a lot of Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds in its tenderness.

I feel that aspects of this novel will stay with me for awhile as I filter them through the lens of my own life.
Profile Image for natalie zander.
140 reviews3 followers
July 15, 2024
came for the ballet (i was a ballerina for 7 years can u believe that), stayed when i realized this would not only get me out of my slump, but become an oft revisited staple in my personal library
67 reviews1 follower
September 19, 2024
Slow-burn profound. Will be thinking of this one for a while & return to it many times I’m sure
Profile Image for Dwight Davis.
673 reviews42 followers
May 29, 2024
A little too weirdly religious and evangelistic for my taste. Trying way too hard to be Aesthetic and forgot to actually tell a story.
Profile Image for Lorin (paperbackbish).
902 reviews27 followers
April 30, 2024
3.5 stars. Not a huge fan of the religious bend this one takes near the end, but the prose is stunning enough for me not to mind overly much.
Profile Image for francisco rivera.
147 reviews4 followers
September 24, 2024
"sometimes serenity and purgatory wear the same face."

picked this one purely because of its title and have learned that this is not the safest guarantee.. i liked the vibes of this book but the voice and style didn't really sell it for me. i think this book would be really helpful for someone going through a crisis of faith / similar life affliction but it didn't reach out from the immediacy of that. it read less like an opera or a novel and more like a series of diary entries (which i do love but does not a story make).

that being said, the moments that really stood out to me were these intensely solitary, mind-bending, ego-dissolving experiences in nature. i have been there in the last year where it feels like you are staring at the blank and empty void of existence, mind reeling and blind-sided, where it feels like your House is On Fire and all you can really do is stand there, and the level of spiritual deconstruction that that gives you is kinda crazy. maybe i need to read this on a retreat or have a copy that i can mark up but i think it wasn't really meant to be read in my bedroom in one sitting. anywazee this is what we got.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews

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