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Elysiana
 
 
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Elysiana [Hardcover]

Chris Knopf (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Book Description

May 1, 2010
Gwendalynn Anders, a mid-Western girl who's never seen the ocean, wonders what was in that joint she smoked a week before waking up on Elysiana, and why it feels like the trip will last the entire summer of 1969.

Jack Halcyon, living atop an abandoned twenty-story hotel, wonders how he's able to ponder the incongruities of life after leaving a big chunk of his brain at the scene of an accident.

Borough Council President Norman Harlan wonders what cruel God put him on an equal footing with Avery Volpe, the fearsome Captain of the Beach Patrol.

Twelve miles long and a mile wide, Elysiana is an island off the coast of New Jersey sitting astride the convergence of powerful fault lines social, political, and existential. It s a place of beauty and insanity, shared by the angelic and profane. Where cops, criminals, prodigies, and the promiscuous find themselves at the haphazard mercy of a lunatic providence.

Other players include a globe-trotting whiz kid, an Italo-Hispanic crime boss, a surfing aesthete and his vulgar roommate, a career car stereo thief, and a seven-year-old girl who's probably spent too much time with the dead bodies in the dunes.

This is a story that could have only happened on the Jersey Shore during the summer of 69. A time when the social fabric was tearing apart, in a place where that fabric had never been very well knit together.

Elysiana is both a fabulist's look at a lost time and place and a hurtling thriller. It's a tale of two types of transition the

personal and the grand. All played out within the isolated magic of a barrier island.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Smart dialogue and sharp social observations distinguish this stand-alone thriller from Knopf (Short Squeeze and four other Hamptons mysteries). In the summer of 1969, life on the sunny New Jersey resort island of Elysiana simmers as town cops feud with the beach patrol, fed-up wives elude their slimy husbands, local politicians double-cross each other, lots of dope flows everywhere, and various needy, wounded people—such as a brain-damaged lifeguard, a young woman from Chicago who fled her lecherous dad, and a smalltime criminal who's also a maniac surfer—look for reasons to go on. Knopf sets up a lot of competing characters capable of semiclever scheming to get what they want, then shows a massive hurricane ripping their plans and their island apart. Like John D. Macdonald or Charles Willeford in a lighter mood, he's unsentimentally fond of his characters and tentatively hopeful about their ability to salvage something from the wreckage around them. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* As the 1969 summer season begins on the New Jersey barrier island of Elysiana—an assortment of seashore amenities and profound dissociation—the cops and the lifeguards prepare for the annual turf war made necessary by a loopy municipal charter and warring city politicians. A druglord arrives in his GTO to murder a local who stiffed him. A drugged-out Chicago girl figuratively washes up on the beach with no clear memory of how she got there, and a local thief and surfer marvels at the ease of stealing eight-track tape players from cars. A full baker’s dozen of major characters swirl and collide as if in Brownian motion, moved by elemental forces like wind and tide and lesser things like work and whim. Signs and portents hint that something life-changing, if not quite apocalyptic, will affect them all. Elysiana is a departure for Knopf, whose Sam Acquillo mysteries have won reviewers’ raves, but he nails it. The seemingly shambling plot proves ultimately to be sly, and Knopf’s sweet-spirited style recalls memories spurred by faded home movies of long-ago vacations. His bio says that he was a New Jersey lifeguard back in the day, and he captures the zeitgeist of the shore perfectly. Every shoobie on the beach who eschews MTV’s odious Jersey Shore should be reading Elysiana this season. --Thomas Gaughan

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Permanent Press (May 1, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1579621988
  • ISBN-13: 978-1579621988
  • Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,440,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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 (5)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Not Really the Way it Was but worth the read, September 7, 2010
This review is from: Elysiana (Hardcover)
I screwed up and made my review a reply, so here is my review. The book is great but having spent many summers in the 60's "down the shore" [In Jersey you don't go to the beach you go "down the Shore"] The Book really doesn't reflect the realities of the Jersey Shore in the Sixties or early Seventies. I don't think there is more than a cursory mention of Vietnam, which was always in our background. Guys would be drafted and disappear for a year or two in the Army, or join up to be "safer" in the Navy or Coast Guard. Many guys would be in the guard like GWBush, but since long hair was in they'd wear short hair wigs for the "Guard" weekends. Dope and Booze were not yet as integrated as the movies would show and heads and hippies usually disdained beer, especially if they had to pay for it, but still the bars were crazy . Anyone who did a matinee at Jerry Lynch's in Belmar would never forget it. The Take a Whack trio doing bad covers. dollar beers. [they were only a quarter at DJ's down the street] Everyone chipping in till the whole bar was covered with full mugs and everyone drank, sang along, a few puked, some fights, and every once in a while a guy even got lucky if he stayed sober enough. The Jersey Girls were Jersey Girls. By the end of the Matinee the concrete floor was covered with liquid of mixed indeterminate origin, HOw we didn't drown afterward is beyond me [we'd swim in the ocean to sober up before eating supper and going out again] I wish the author knew this. Someone write that book but the plot for this if not reflecting the reality is great as is the characters. I recommend it just don't thing that it is the way it was.
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2.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing cover blurb, but failed to live up to its promise, October 25, 2010
By 
avanta7 "avanta7" (Northeast Alabama, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elysiana (Hardcover)
The blurb on the back cover of this bound galley intrigued me: "...both a hurtling thriller and postmodernist jaunt through the summer of 1969..." After making a valiant effort (I put it down and came back to it three times), I'm here to tell you this novel may be postmodern, whatever that may mean, but it is definitely not hurtling, and not a thriller.

Let me tell you the good things. The novel opens with great promise and one of the best introductions to a character I've ever read: Gwendalynn's arrival in the coastal community of Elysiana, a semi-conscious passenger in the back of a convertible, flashing the truckers as she comes down from a three-day high. I liked her right off the bat. Sadly, she is one of only three characters I actually gave a damn about. The other two were Sweetie, a charming and independent 10-year-old with a penchant for wandering; and Jack, a coma survivor who lives in the rundown grand hotel once run by his family. Everyone else inhabiting this fictional island either annoyed the fire out of me, or engendered great dislike, or both. I can read a story when a couple/three characters are actively unpleasant, but a novel peopled almost entirely with folks I can't stand? Not happening.

It's too bad, too, because Chris Knopf can turn a phrase. He has a good ear for dialogue, like the following exchange:

"I have everything I need in my backpack."
"Do you have cruelty in there?"
"I have a horsehair shaving brush in the pack. It was cruel to take it from the horse."

Knopf's flair for description can make you hear the squabbling seagulls and feel the ocean breeze. Ultimately, though, he failed to keep my interest. At the end of chapter 9, at 118 pages, I still didn't know what this story was about and didn't care enough about the characters to keep reading and find out.

Regardless of my apathetic reaction to the novel itself, I appreciate The Permanent Press and LibraryThing's Early Reviewers giving me the opportunity to try a new author.

And the cover art is gorgeous.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Thriller, 1969, babes, beachboys, love and crime, August 30, 2010
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Elysiana (Hardcover)
This is an excellent book. It's an evocation of one summer in 1969. It's so well written you're there in the sand and sun, sleazy bars, back alleys and a raging storm.
It's a thriller/mystery, by genre. But much more. The prose is clean and lively, extremely descriptive both physically and psychologically. The characters are alive (cliche, I know, but true).
The story is about love, memory loss, drugs, competing politicians and odd, wonderful outsiders. It's about the Atlantic ocean and a sandy strip of an island off the New Jersey shore - maybe a microcosm of the world, maybe just a slice of one summer long ago.
For folks who like good writing, complex characters, interlocking relationships and, perhaps, a hint of fantasy with their mystery, buy this one. It's very good.
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