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This book was brilliant, entertaining and heartbreaking. The world Gran has created is so fascinating, that it exerts an inescapable pull on me, drawing me into its orbit. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. The Millions' future depends on your support.
Become a member today. Of all of the wonderfully insightful Charlie Rose segments on books and writing, the one that sticks with me the most is the contentious debate between David Foster Wallace , Jonathan Franzen , and Mark Leyner about the current state of literature in America. Wallace was on the heels of Infinite Jest and Franzen was building up to his perfected synergy of the Midwestern America family after two well-received warmups that underperformed commercially.
Leyner had a novel and a collection to his name, both of which were highly satirical while maintaining an aura of symbiotic self-consciousness. Wallace was on the cusp of canonization, a distinction Franzen would reach with his novel, The Corrections ; Leyner continued to produce a steady stream of fictional and nonfictional oddities, like his collaboration with Dr. And so while Franzen and Wallace need no introduction, Mark Leyner, a man who has spent a career experimenting with style, structure, and genre, seems comparatively under-loved.
His sophomore romp, The Tetherballs of Bougainville depicts a lauded teenage screenwriter with the same name. For a writer who has made a career out of wry quips and flares of reality mixed with the imagined, Gone with the Mind is a culmination of these tendencies, more a gesticulation of satiric irony than cohesive narrative. The narrative is, ultimately, a novel-length speech.
While at times it is focused, it frequently rambles on the composition of the fake book inside the metafiction. My experience reading the novel spawned an array of adjectives, often in the span of a few seconds. Absurd, juvenile, sophisticated, selfless, masturbatory, profound. Authors frequently insert themselves into their own novels, but they work in ways that keep the end product undeniably fiction.
Roosevelt in the presidential election is purely fantasy. Ben Marcus rewound to his childhood in Notable American Women , which centers around behavioral modification and mind control. Other examples stray closer to the real. Jonathan Safran Foer real traveled to the Ukraine alongside American pop culture enthusiast Alexander Perchov make-believe in Everything is Illuminated.
The voice, age, and background of Foer in his novel are largely synchronized with the author himself. Douglas Coupland took the rare route of becoming a villain in JPod. Perhaps the most common insertion tactic for fiction writers is to portray fiction writers. Paul Auster the detective has his identity stolen by Daniel Quinn, the fictitious mystery writer and protagonist of The New York Trilogy.
Martin Amis is hired to rewrite a fledgling film in Money. After spending decades toiling with his mammoth fantasy series, The Dark Tower, one cannot fault Stephen King for actually acknowledging himself as the writer of epic series. Eggers dressed up his postmodern memoir with fiction; Leyner dances around truths in a novel.
Leyner substitutes close friends with mainly his mother, and a smattering of other friends and relatives as he sorts through, and attempts to make sense of, his own life experience: Leyner, in an effort to subvert the reader from digesting the tale like a conventional novel, introduces the Imaginary Intern, a quasi-intuitive, philosophical entity surmised from a craquelure in the food court bathroom tiles.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Imaginary Intern serves as the vessel -- a foil for Mark Leyner the character. One can see the Imaginary Intern as the motivations behind writers including themselves in their fictions. In essence, it is the trial and error of entering and wading through the falsehoods of fiction as a living, breathing person in an effort to create a fresh version of oneself: And this was something the Imaginary Intern and I used to always talk about trying to do in Gone with the Mind , trying somehow to express the chord of how one feels at a single given moment, in this transient, phantom world, standing in the center of a food court at a mall with your mom, but in the arpeggiated exploded diagram of an autobiography.
For me, it was during one of the many dialogues between Mark and the Imaginary Intern. Leyner, Wallace, and Franzen discuss their concerns about the crowded entertainment market vying for our time. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. This is Mark Leyner commenting on fiction in a way that only he can; he admirably dissects the problems with modern readers while simultaneously building a bridge to new readership. Within the many digressions and the back-and-forth with the Imaginary Intern, Leyner sporadically muses on the human condition and effectively broadens the scope of his narrative: Mark Leyner has spent his career carving his niche and discovering his singular voice.
This declarative voice bellows from the food court podium in Gone with the Mind , demanding our undivided attention. Leyner is an oddity in American literature, a writer of virtuoso talent who chooses to spin genre-defying stories instead of capitalizing on what readers of literature have come to expect from the novel form. But he is at his most remarkable when dealing with the experience of the senses, the means we use to escape ourselves.
It is a thrilling novella, and yet its thrills feel slightly dubious because we are invited to revel in what amounts to drug pornography -- a specialist genre which, from Hunter S. Thompson to William Burroughs , is notable for its talent-crushing ODs. Instead of being combed through with greatness, the writing is only great at intervals. I can imagine St Aubyn, like Raymond Chandler , keeping a notebook of devastating descriptions to be deployed when an otherwise bland paragraph is in need of horsepower.
But those who have not read all of the Melrose sequence may feel at a disadvantage when they come to At Last the books are now also out in a set The Patrick Melrose Novels. He seemed to have been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness. He is separated from his wife, Mary, though still dependent on her. With his inherited money gone, he is living in a bedsit though, in a nod to his erstwhile privilege, the bedsit is in Kensington.
The only person he can really open up to is his friend Johnny Hall, who is, perhaps appropriately, a child psychologist. The funeral setting allows for a raft of characters to be in the same place, many of whom Patrick despises: Most of them are members of the decaying upper class. Everyone at the funeral is troubled in their own way.
Eleanor, like a Mrs. Jellyby recast by Evelyn Waugh , has left a legacy of pain to Patrick and a legacy of bewilderment to everyone else. She spent much of her life desperate to help others through charity, while her own son was being abused by her husband, David, one of the most relentlessly despicable characters in recent English fiction.
Eleanor tells Mary of a particularly upsetting incident, when a drunken David circumcised his infant son as Eleanor and others looked on, too scared to do anything.
Yet St Aubyn can stumble when he tries to push conflicted thoughts onto paper. His simile-laden style has no purchase in the tangle of feelings that Patrick experiences towards the end of the novel. At the molten heart of things everything resembles everything else: St Aubyn is also capable of dropping the ball entirely.
The following sentence is the literary equivalent of a blooper reel: From what can be gathered from interviews, St Aubyn lived through many of the most traumatic episodes of his novels.
This autobiographical strand is repeated to the point of numbness in most reviews and features, but it is worth remembering that the Melrose books are presented by the author as fiction. In a lot of cases, joining the dots between life and art is a futile practice, and not very interesting either. It is tempting because it is easy, which is why it is not appropriate for these addictive but complicated novels; and it can also lead to the reader doing the author too many favors, investing emotion when it is not there in the words. Rather than create simple works of historical fiction, fashioning narratives set solely in war-ravaged Europe, Ullman, like Chabon and Foer, has ushered in a fecund new phase of Holocaust fiction.
It is not only necessary that we try to recapture the morally-starved world of the actual Holocaust, but that we take up the question of how much that bleak history should define our present-day lives. Chandler The Long Goodbye paraphrased. Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Eight incredible horror mysteries. Over a thousand pages of suspense and terror. A Nichelle Clarke Crime Thriller. A Marine on loan to the CIA caught in a conspiracy contrived by those he trusts most.
Jack Noble is part Reach, part Bourne, and all action. Now in one premium boxset. Download these three hits and see why Ted Galdi is the thriller genre's hottest new writer. Mariner Books; Reprint edition May 1, Language: Page 1 of 1 Start Over Page 1 of 1. A Private Detective for the New Age The video content is inappropriate. The video content is misleading.
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Gran, who has written for the TNT series Southland , structures the Claire DeWitt books more like a cable series than a standard-issue mystery series. While at times it is focused, it frequently rambles on the composition of the fake book inside the metafiction. The streets of the Lower Ninth Ward were caked in grayish-brown dried mud. Learn how your comment data is processed. I mean, I guess I should have seen the ending coming in retrospect, but I didn't. Alfred Prufrock" in high school and you fell in love with those words, then The Archivist will compel you to read them again. My experience reading the novel spawned an array of adjectives, often in the span of a few seconds.
There is too much buffering. The audio is poor or missing.
Video is unrelated to the product. Please fill out the copyright form to register a complaint. While learning the ropes of her family's matchmaking business, Gladie gets involved in a murder investigation. Will she be able to catch the culprit? A Women of Redemption Suspense Thriller.
The trial ended years ago, but her nightmare is just beginning. Intimidation and ultimatums weave a complicated web of murder, conspiracy, and lies. A gripping crime novel featuring a bold female detective, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and unexpected twists. First in the series. When justice turns to murder, she'll have to expose the truth Blackmail, murder, and revenge makes sure no one plays by the rules. Share your thoughts with other customers.
Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention new orleans claire dewitt city of the dead sara gran dewitt and the city jacques silette post-katrina new main character hurricane katrina vic willing world greatest greatest detective french detective sherlock holmes constance darling private investigator district attorney private eye nancy drew post katrina. There was a problem filtering reviews right now.
Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Set in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, it moves through the city like infection in an open wound. Gran's narrative is complex; plotlines branch off and past histories reveal themselves. And at the center is Claire DeWitt, a new breed of hard edged PI, living dangerously in a tough profession with no false illusions, and she is not above seeking solace in drugs or in a brief sexual encounter.
Claire is hired to find a well known New Orleans DA, who disappeared days after the levees burst. And New Orleans, in the months following Katrina, is a city decimated by ruin and despair, its pre-storm populace scattered throughout the neighboring states. Where does a detective begin?
Author Sara Gran provides Claire with an amazing fictional character to help light the way, master detective and author Jacques Silette. Sara Gran creates in Silette a mysterious figure, a French detective who saw and solved mysteries that others could never fathom.
It serves as the unseen yardstick against which all the events that transpire in New Orleans are measured, and it also serves as the world compass of Claire DeWitt. His only reward will be the awful, unbearable truth itself. Follow only the clues. The story is haunted by other ghosts: Your family will shut you out. The police, of course, will loathe you. Your clients will never forgive you for telling them the truth. Everyone pretends they want their mysteries solved but no one does.
I found myself cringing as Claire passed out after smoking angel dust with a thug, a terrible and risky way for a private dick to get close to a case. In one memorable scene, Claire is taken for a ride by thugs in a black Hummer, and on the way to what might be her death she prays to multiple deities, from Tibetan mantras to Saint Joseph, and the whole scene was a stunning piece of fiction that stayed with me long after.
Claire is an interesting and unexpected character, cut from the cloth of past PIs, private dicks, and other masters of detection, a person who lives and breathes her work. Witty, frightening, off beat and more. At times a difficult read, it will pleasure those that give it the attention it deserves. The novel quite often treads into the not-so-friendly areas of New Orleans as Claire tries to solve the disappearance of Vic Willing, and, as you might expect, she meets quite a few unsavory types.
Silette wrote Detection, a book that Claire constantly references as a means to guide her in her investigation. She often pulls philosophical nuggets and quotes from that book that she reflects on. She also constantly resorts to drugs, booze and clairvoyance as a means of solving a case.
There are points where the narrative drags and becomes burdened with too many unnecessary scenes that are not integral to the plot.
In addition, there was too much unnecessary language in the book. I did like how everything tied together at the end, but it seemed like it too long to get there, and I had to put down the book several times before soldiering on to the finish line. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful.
Kind of quirky, but so New Orleans!! Couldnt help thinking of James Lee Burke. Young woman detective hired to find cause of death for very well liked local man. Subject takes back seat to the city itself. Have lived near N. Puts you in the city! Story is good too, gets the feel of the place so well.