Arrive at Easterwine [Mass Market Paperback]

R.A. Lafferty (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 12, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345231643
• ISBN-13: 978-0345231642
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,132,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Machine, April 5, 2006

By 

Gord Wilson "alivingdog.com" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Arrive at Easterwine (Mass Market Paperback)

This is one of Lafferty's lesser-known book-length novels, and unlike Past Master, Fourth Mansions and a few others, has not been recently reprinted in a new edition. Some readers probably wouldn't give it five stars; I do so in relation to Lafferty's other output, which is so voluminous that I recently read an article about him in which I didn't recognize any of the books the author mentioned.

Lafferty is best known for short stories that appeared in various sci-fi mags, including Orbit, and in a number of paperback collections (and some in hardback book club editions) such as Ringing Changes, Nine Hundred Grandmothers and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? I first discovered him after reading a review that made his books sound so oddly intriguing that I had to have a go at them, and initially read numerous short stories and novellas.

However, I much prefer his longer novels, or rather some of them. Lafferty is an odd duck--read: original writer and unique visionary, but even within his own canon his books vary widely, arguably not in quality but in style (while remaining unmistakeably Laffertarian). At least as few are classics, but they are often the least available (and least read). My list of greats would include: Fourth Mansions, Past Master, Not to Mention Camels, Annals of Klepsis, and Arrive at Easterwine. Books I can't get into or through (although they may be favorites of other readers) include The Devil is Dead and Apocalypses. Somewhere in the middle I would place Space Chantey and The Thirteenth Voyage of Sinbad, but I have not begun to exhaust his catalog.

This book is told in the first person, and as with Asimov's I Robot (recently recast as an excellent film) and Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, that first person is a machine. Not as light as Lafferty's Reefs of Earth but not as heavy as some of the above novels, it remains a flight of fancy where all deals are off and reality (whatever that is) is turned on its head in a typically? Laffertarian fashion that readers who've caught the Lafferty bug (and are therefore doomed to endlessly seek out and devour more R.A.L.) may enjoy.