Summary

In the first chapter of The Mirror Thief, Martin Seay’s unnamed narrator describes a man waking up in a hotel room in Venice, Italy. The narrator establishes a second-person limited perspective by addressing the reader directly and presenting extremely controlled yet evocative details. With the opening line, “Listen. This is what you see,” the narrative intelligence commands the reader’s careful consideration of the imagery that follows.

The first image presented in the novel is “[a] tall casement window,” and the entire opening chapter is conveyed as if the reader is peering through the glass (1). The narrator encourages the reader to imagine a typical hotel room by stating, “Hotel shit. The type of shit they always put in hotels. Doesn’t matter where” (1). The narrator acknowledges the bewildering familiarity of a typical hotel room, as if this particular hotel room could be...