In this affecting and unusual metafictional novel, Patricio Pron describes his sudden return to Argentina in 2008, for the first time in eight years. Pron had left his home in El Trebol, about two hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires, for Germany in his mid-twenties to pursue a literary career. He had not believed that a writer from a poor country and a poor neighborhood could become part of the imaginary republic of letters to which he aspired in New York, London, or Berlin. Now his father is ill, and though the family has not been close, he immediately decides to return home. What follows is a dramatic tale of fathers and sons, an examination of time and memory, a study of people who believe that a life without principles is not worth living, and a memory of good people who have been so traumatized by events from another time that they have little common ground for communication with other generations. Dividing the novel into four parts, the author describes his childhood memories in Part I (at least those that he remembers after eight years of heavy drug use in Europe); the disappearance and murder, just two months before his arrival, of a man who worked at a local club and knew his father; his decision to examine his father’s personal files and to follow up on his father’s investigation into this death and the long history which preceded it; and his discovery of who his father really is and how he is representative of other fathers whose actions and spirit should not be forgotten
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Using the point of view of a female victim for the first time, and setting the story in a chaotic near future, James Sallis introduces the back story for Jenny Rowan, a name she assumed after she was held prisoner from the age of seven to the age of nine, confined to a wooden box under the bed of her kidnapper, who viciously assaulted her sexually for two years. When she eventually managed to escape, she hid in the Westwood Mall for two years, scrounging for food and discarded clothing, until she was discovered by social services and assigned to a juvenile facility until her sixteenth birthday. Aid from an elderly woman after she was freed led to a job at a café for five years, while she also went on to school and received a degree. Throughout, she recognizes the help she has received from good people who allow her to make her own decisions, and eventually she finds the perfect job, working for a TV station where she spends all day alone in a dark office finding snippets of stories on the internet and then combining them into features for the evening news. It is in this job that Jenny is working when this novel opens, and she quickly becomes real for the reader, who grows to care deeply about her. Sallis, in writing this, has seized life here and twisted it way beyond all norms, establishing easily identifiable themes about a victim’s emotional survival and strength, her tenuous steps into society, her need to progress at her own pace, and eventually her ability to reach out and help “others of [her] kind.” The focus is allegorical and experimental, and Jenny’s early life more closely resembles fantasy, however dark, than it realism.
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In Tumbledown, Boswell uses his experience as a psychological counselor to create realistic but damaged characters who try and fail every day to accommodate the impossible. The theme -that every day a sane person must figure out ways to deal with the impossible – permeates every aspect of this novel by the prize-winning author. In his dedication to the book, in fact, Boswell honors “all the clients who survived my tenure as a counselor and to the one who didn’t,” an ominous introduction to this novel set in a residential facility, where main character therapist James Candler is responsible for six young clients, most of them under the age of twenty-five. For the first third of the novel, author Boswell introduces his dysfunctional characters, their past histories, and their problems, not just for the clients but the staff, too. The “plot,” a collection of vignettes involving the characters and their interactions with each other and with life in general, unwinds on several levels at once. The often grotesque ironies in the characters’ lives and their sometimes bizarre interactions, do, at times, lead to scenes bordering on farce, but the overlay of the clients’ dysfunctions and the sympathy these people engender in the reader keep the novel grounded, even when the characters are not.
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In this newly reprinted novel from 1938, considered the “first jazz novel” ever written, author Dorothy Baker takes the reader into the mind and heart of a young white boy whose desire to excel as a creative jazz musician is so overwhelming that he lets nothing get in his way – not the fact that he is only a child when he begins to pursue his interest, not the fact that he is an orphan living virtually alone with a young aunt and uncle who are home only once or twice a week, not the fact that he is supposed to be in school, and not the fact that he has no instrument at all that he can play. Born in Georgia, Paul Martin has recently moved to a poor section of Los Angeles where his guardians have found work. Though he is not a good student in his school’s assigned subjects (and cannot remember how much seven times seven is), he has learned to read music and “could memorize like a flash anything that had any swing to it, anything that he could take hold of rhythmically.” Becoming a truant in order to practice piano in a mission church, Rick eventually switches to the trumpet and eventually finds success in jazz clubs in California and New York. The obsession of creative jazz musicians for perfect moments is clearly depicted here, and the author’s ability to bring the reader into the mind of the creative artist is stunning. The obsession of Rick Martin for more and more and more, and his inability to take a rest, as he begins relying on alcohol to keep going, shows the powerful drive of some creative talents such as that of Rick (and for the model for this character, Bix Beiderbecke)
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Charlie McCarthy, who is twenty-five as the book begins, is writing about events which occurred five years ago in Ballyronan, outside of Cork, events so traumatic for him that he is still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And that’s on top of his problems as a “Gamal,” short for Gamallogue, an Irish word for someone who is “different” – not someone who is developmentally handicapped in the usual sense but someone, like Charlie, who seems to do everything wrong – unintentionally wearing his shirt back to front, forgetting to wear his socks, spilling his Lucozade on his shirt in the pub, and saying the wrong things at funerals. For two years “after the things that happened,” he says, he was unable to do anything at all. “I just was.” The reader knows from the opening paragraph that Charlie’s trauma involved two lovers, his friends Sinead and James, and his early descriptions of Sinead in the past tense lets us know from the outset that she has died. Writing on the advice of his psychiatrist, Charlie delays and delays, but eventually begins to talk about the events which resulted in his trauma.
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