With its quick narrative pacing, its unusual story lines filled with ironies, its wounded characters (appealing in their vulnerability), and the novel’s inherent charm, this newly reprinted novel from 1975 may be the perfect answer for lovers of literary fiction looking for a great book to read on a hot summer day. Russell Hoban is in fine fettle here, creating a novel which raises big questions while focusing on two quiet characters whose lives are about to change in significant ways. The “ends” they have been seeking have been present in their “beginnings,” as the review’s opening sentence (from T. S. Eliot) indicates, though until now these characters have not recognized this, spending their middle age dreaming and second-guessing – and ruing the fact that they have missed their chances for happier, more satisfying lives. In their separate narratives, William G. and Neaera H. share their lives and their thoughts. William G., the divorced father of two, now works in a bookshop and lives in a small room. As the novel opens, he is at the zoo, but he concludes, petulantly, that “I don’t want to go to the Zoo anymore.” Neaera H., a writer of children’s stories, is sick of writing about Gillian Vole and birthday parties, and has been contemplating using a predator as her next character. As her first commentary opens, she has just purchased a home aquarium, not for fish, but for a Great Water-beetle, which she has ordered by mail. Eventually, both speakers come together in a plan to release the sea turtles into the ocean, an event which changes their lives. A great book for a book club.
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Vincent Balmer’s decision to write a “novel” about Antonio Flores, with whom he works, results in an engaging story in which Vincent, a writer, talks about his writing, his troubled characters explore the present and share their unhappy pasts, his lovers fall in and out of love and fail to connect with the objects of their desire, and a confessed serial killer goes on trial, “half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank.” I put the word “novel” in quotation marks here because though the speaker’s “novel” contains all the ingredients which could make Antonio’s story an exciting best seller, author Herve Le Tellier himself deliberately rejects the traditions of the novel as it has been written for hundreds of years. As a member of the French literary group “Oulipo,” a “workshop of potential literature,” Le Tellier is dedicated to finding “new patterns and structures which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” As a result, he takes this novel in the many different directions which he fancies, leaving the reader to tag along for the ride. Vincent has recently returned to Lisbon from Paris following a failed love affair. A journalist, he is working with Antonio Flores, a photographer, covering the trial of a serial killer for a Paris magazine, a narrative which fades into the background when the speaker becomes more interested in writing the story of Antonio, the people they both know, their overlapping histories, and their real and imagined amours. Clever and full of fun (and games), Electrico W examines the themes of love and death with a good deal of honest emotion.
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Alfred Hayes, an almost-forgotten author who wrote this book in 1958, spent much of his career writing screenplays, both in Hollywood and in Europe, and he uses the skills he developed in writing for films to great advantage here. His economy of language, a necessity for great film scenes, allows him to develop a novel in which the reader becomes a participant, imagining the dramatic pauses in dialogue, the tones of conversations, and the words a character does not say at times in which s/he might be expected to reveal something crucial. As a result, this brief novel, close to a novella in length, is so evocative that upon reading it for the second time, the reader gains even more appreciation of the author’s technique – and his brilliance. His control of both his material and his literary objectives is absolute, his writing style is flawless, and he never has to resort to literary trickery to keep the reader focused on two characters who, despite their lack of uniqueness are, nevertheless, emotionally exposed to the reader and for all the world to see.
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Addressing a “hypocritical reader, my double, my brother,” a former revolutionary from Chile is telling her story to a someone who may be part of a truth commission investigating events that occurred in Santiago in the 1970s, a man who has traced her from Chile to a hospice in Stockholm. Lorena has consented to being interviewed, though she has little hope that the writer will be accurate in conveying what she wants to say, fearing that he will reduce her story to a “moral adventure tale.” She is old and dying, and she has a long history, however, and as she begins her story, we see her back in the years just before the death of President Salvador Allende (in 1973). She is a young woman and a new, unmarried mother. When a university friend visits her after the birth of her baby and takes her to a political demonstration in Santiago, she soon finds herself “caught up in something big, an enormous collective body.” She eventually becomes an active participant with this group, the Red Ax. Readers will empathize with Lorena, recognizing some of the turning points in which she may have made the wrong decisions, and, at the same time, understanding the pressures which have led to her decisions. As she tries to protect her interests on both sides of the political spectrum, Lorena eventually finds herself admitting, “I’m the one I want to erase from my life.”
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Wanting to find serenity, a new life, and maybe even a new love, Kerrigan has arrived in Copenhagen, the birthplace of his mother, hoping for changes in his own life, but “like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted” words like those above, urging him, instead, to eat, drink, and be merry. Kerrigan, who has a Ph.D. in literature, experienced a personal disaster three years ago, one in which he lost his young wife, his three-year-old daughter, and an unborn child, and he has come to believe that “that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.” Now, as the new millennium is about to arrive, Kerrigan plans to “clothe himself in [Copenhagen’s] thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets’ songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.” For Kennedy, as he relates the story of Kerrigan, Copenhagen becomes the equivalent of the Dublin which Stephen Dedalus explores in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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