Crowe's Requiem is an eerie, dark, and otherworldly tale of a young man of uncertain origins and of his dreamlike but all-too-rapid transit through life. Rich in language and imagination, it is the work of an uncommonly talented young writer.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The first section of Crowe's Requiem is eerily reminiscent of Günter Grass's classic novel The Tin Drum. In that book, young Oskar refuses to grow, remaining instead in the body of a 3-year-old even as he ages mentally and psychologically. In Irish writer Mike McCormack's novel, the title character not only refuses to grow, he won't walk or speak, either. "I was taking stock of the world and had made a decision not to pronounce on it until I was in full possession of the facts. I would not be lured so easily. So throughout my infancy I stayed dumb, a watcher on the kitchen floor; piling up information in my heart, waiting for my moment." Eventually the moment comes and the boy begins to grow. He also goes to live with the only member of his family who understands him, his grandfather, who has a grim take on the world: "There will be death and pain and affliction, illness and grieving, and humiliation, any number of variations on the fundamental misery of being.... I would like to be able to tell you a different story, but any other version would fly in the face of the facts." From this relentlessly honest old man, the child learns, among other things, the importance of having the right name, for without it, a man isn't himself. He christens himself Crowe.
In the little village of Furnace in the west of Ireland, Crowe is friendless. Once he arrives at a university in the city, however, he makes a vital connection with a young woman. But their happiness is short-lived when Crowe makes a rash choice out of love, and pays a terrible price. In his debut collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head, Mike McCormack displayed great versatility, ranging from gruesome black humor to touching familial love. Crowe's Requiem has all of his darkness but all of his tenderness as well, as he limns this tale of a self-described fallen angel. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Crowe is a young Irishman desperately seeking to apply a mythic gloss to his brief, awkward life in McCormack's bleak first novel, following his praised collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head. As the book begins, Crowe is only 20 but dying of progeria, a rare aging disease. Like any old man, he looks back upon his life and tries to invest the past with some meaning. Raised in the backcountry Irish village of Furnace by his grandfather, he was an indifferent student; yet he won a place at university in the city, and fell in love with a fellow student, Maria Callas Monk. As Crowe recounts his tale, however, he recollects Furnace as a land of "chthonic gloom," which "opened up before me like a wound in creation," and his enigmatic grandfather as a "harrowed visionary" who spikes his dysfunctional lessons about life with fatalism and violence. A few years older than Crowe, Maria becomes not simply his troubled girlfriend but this image of an enchanted princess, and when she faces financial crisis, he submits to a suspicious pharmacological trial in a misguided effort to save his damsel in distress. Maria furiously and accurately accuses Crowe of always seeing himself at the center of a drama, as if the world arranged itself in order to cast him in a pivotal heroic role. Although McCormack fashions Crowe's as "a story of death and enchantment, madness and delusion, faint hearts and fair maids," this is a stretch for his protagonist's more humble range. In caging his readers within the mind of a boy possessed of a vivid imagination who is destined never to grow up, literally or figuratively, the author's subversive triumph is in revealing Crowe's failure to transform himself from an ordinary luckless soul (albeit with an extraordinary disease) into a tragic hero. (Mar.) FYI: Getting It In the Head won Britain's Rooney Prize in 1996.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Something to Crowe About,
By
This review is from: Crowe's Requiem : A Novel (Hardcover)
I bought this book two months ago in Ireland after hearing Mr. McCormack read. Even though I knew that the quality of writing would be remarkable from having heard passages from the novel, I avoided reading it because I thought it would be too dark, too depressing. When I finally succumbed, I was dumbstruck by the the richness of character, the sharply turned phrases, and fluid description throughout. It would have been a shame if the "macabre" on the fly leaf had scared me off before I gave it a chance.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Crowe's Requiem is wonderful!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Crowe's Requiem : A Novel (Hardcover)
This book was very interesting. I loved how it kept me guessing at what would happen next; it was a definate page-turner. Crowe's character was very well developed and thoughtful. Even from his birth the reader knew he was gong to be a different person in one way or another
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Crowing Glory?,
By A Customer
This review is from: Crowe's Requiem : A Novel (Hardcover)
I was a rabid fan of this mans first book, "getting it in the head". It lives up to the blurb of being poe meets borges. I was thus dying to read this. Unfortunately, this is a short story that was spun out too long. The central conceit does not "pay off". Unfortunately, McCormack has brought out that difficult second book. I look forward to a more mature third effort.
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