The Moresbys are about to get “all the way into life” in ways they have never expected. Having left the United States for an adventure in Morocco, main character Porter Moresby is careful to describe himself as a traveler, not a tourist. “The difference is partly one of time, he [explains]. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than another, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” This is the Moresbys’ first trip across the Atlantic since 1939, since all of Europe and much of Africa has been consumed for ten years with World War II and its aftereffects. In 1949, when they decide to do some traveling, North Africa is one of the few places to which they can obtain boat passage. In this unusual and thoughtful debut novel, Bowles takes crass Americans out of their normal post-war environment, allowing the reader to see them in a more universal context. This is not a love story, by any means, despite Bernardo Bertolucci’s attempt to make it one in his 1990 film adaptation with Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Instead, the two main characters are so limited, both in their relationships with their peers and in relationships with the wider, outside world that neither is fully capable of feeling real emotion for anyone other than self. Their trip is a disaster. One of Modern’s Library’s 100 Best Novels of All Time.
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I am so sad that I have finished this collection of stories and must finally write a review. In fact, I actually read this book twice, but writing the review is like saying goodbye to people I may never see again, and these characters feel real, familiar, true to life, and ultimately memorable. I am not by nature a sentimental person – in fact, I may be more like some of the characters in this book than I am willing to admit – so this reaction is not characteristic. And when I say these short stories are among the best I have read since Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and then add that they are so clean, neat, and perceptive in their style and presentation that they remind me of those by Andre Dubus (the father), I am not exaggerating. Kane’s stories are sensitive, psychologically astute, and filled with observations that will expand your own viewpoint, maybe even allowing you to see yourself in new ways. The title says it all. Each character here (and some of them repeat in several stories) is facing an event which may change his/her life significantly. As the characters’ stories unfold, each person comes “this close” to having a life-changing revelation, only to have the opportunity escape them, in most cases, through their own inactions, as they turn back to the comfort of the familiar and the habitual, or as they ignore the possibilities.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, England, Experimental, France, Germany, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, US Regional on Mar 3rd, 2013
This novel is definitely not science fiction. Instead it is a wide-ranging novel about just about anything that comes into the author’s head, told in glorious and inglorious imagery throughout. Though it is set almost entirely between 1931 and 1939 and does trace the idea of teleportation as a motif throughout the novel, it is really the story of Egon Loeser, a young set designer at the Allien Theatre in Berlin who is determined to do something spectacular with his life. A proponent of the New Expressionist theatre as a reaction to realism, Loeser is, quite frankly, the “loser” that his name suggests, almost totally lacking success in the area of paramount importance to him – sex. As the novel jumps wildly around in time and place, Loeser becomes involved in a series of crazy episodes as the action continues and continues, ricocheting around through time and space, incorporating vivid stories. Characters are killed and disemboweled, their hearts removed; and ghosts appear and reappear, with one character breeding ghosts for use in a machine which they will power. Virtually everyone gets blackmailed about an assortment of crimes, and one character stays busy selling the skeletons of Troodonians. This novel is unique, one requiring a good deal of patience, and even fortitude, at least for some of us who are significantly older than the twenty-seven-year-old author.
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In his brief biographies of approximately forty “literary rogues,” from the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) to James Frey (1969 – ), author Andrew Shaffer enumerates the many addictions of each author – virtually all of them associated with alcoholism and drugs and/or their frequent carryover into sexual obsession. In fact, if one were to regard these authors as typical of the period, one might conclude that, until the last couple of decades, addictions of all kinds were practically mandatory for successful writers. How else, these authors seemed to think, could a writer tap into his creativity and release his “inner story-teller” with all its attendant angels or demons? Joyce Carol Oates once pointed out that “nobody tells anecdotes about the quiet people who just do their work,” and the author himself observes that if you “Take a look at any list of the top hundred novels of all time…you’ll see plenty of quiet, sober names…As memoirists have known for years, the more [messed] up your life, the more compelling your life story.” Here some of the “wayward authors” get more of the attention they obviously sought, but the fact that they are here, and known to the reader at all, attests to the fact that they somehow managed to achieve fame, if not respect, despite their various addictions and problems.
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One of the best debut novels I have read in a long time, Falling to Earth focuses on the aftermath of the largest and most powerful tornado ever to hit the United States, one known as the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, which traveled two hundred nineteen miles through northeast Missouri, across southern Illinois, and into southwest Indiana over the course of three hours eighteen minutes. Destroying everything in its path, it killed almost seven hundred people. Author Kate Southwood describes the aftermath of this storm in the town of Marah, Illinois, a rural composite of all the communities hit by this horrific storm. What elevates this novel above a journalistic report of buildings destroyed and communities devastated is Southwood’s focus on the effects of the tornado on one family – not the inspiring survival story of a family that has lost everything, as one might expect, but the story of a family that has lost nothing, their children safe, their home intact, and their lumber business safe. The novel’s fast pace, a direct result of the author’s ability to present details with which the reader will identify, combined with her careful building of the resentment against the Graves family, make this a novel which few will forget.
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