Glimpses [Paperback]

Lewis Shiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2010

Ray Shackleford is trying to deal with the death of his father and the collapse of his marriage when the impossible happens. Music that no one has ever heard before begins to play from his stereo speakers. It is only the first step on a journey that will take him to Los Angeles, London, Cozumel, and points far beyond, and bring him face to face with Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix-and his own mortality.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Shiner ( Slam , LJ 8/1/90, among others) has written what may be the first rock n roll time-travel novel. Ray Chackleford is a self-employed electronics repairman whose marriage is foundering and whose father has recently died. These unresolved relationships are complicated when Ray travels to the Mexican site of his father's death and promptly falls in love with a woman even more unstable than he. In the midst of this emotional turmoil, Ray--a rock drummer during his youth in the late Sixties--begins to hear in his head and manages to transfer to tape legendary unfinished recordings by Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson, and Jimi Hendrix. This music is accompanied by "journeys" into the troubled lives of these rock musicians. Shiner's appealing main character and his gripping style overcome the less believable aspects of his story. With the current comeback of the Sixties, this novel should be widely popular.
- A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Can the 60's cure the 90's? That's what Texas stereo repairman Ray Shackleford struggles to prove in this strenuous fantasy of rock- and-roll hits that never were. Shortly after his unloving father drowns in Cozumel, Ray starts to imagine he's hearing impossible songtracks that he's able to record directly from his head. He takes his tape of the Beatles' never- recorded hit ``The Long and Winding Road'' to L.A. producer Graham Hudson, who's already remastered three volumes of Glimpses from rock's legendary past, and Graham persuades him to go after bigger game. So Ray travels back in time, changing history enough so that Jim Morrison can record Celebration of the Lizard and Brian Wilson can persist in his breakthrough album Smile. There's money to be made here, of course, but what Ray and Graham really want is to save the world by recalling the aging rock audience to its ardent roots. (Maybe a little too ardent, as when Ray wonders, ``Was it that way for everybody, music and sex and politics and love all inextricably part of each other, or is it just me?'') Trying to come to terms with his hated father's death, Ray takes time out to retrace his steps in Cozumel, attempting to re-create his own experience of the 60's more directly in 1989, but his romance with a diving instructor seems to open wide the rift in his ten-year marriage without giving him a satisfactory alternative, and he ends up repeating his father's experience instead of accepting it. So it's back to the past for one last try--with a Jimi Hendrix album that Ray hopes can keep the 60's from ending. As you'd expect from versatile fantasist Shiner (Slam, 1990, etc.), Ray's attempts to keep the faith by resurrecting Jimi and laying his own father to rest are powerfully affecting. Much more than yuppie reunions like The Big Chill, this captures a generation's sweet, desperate yearning for the 60's--though it ends up as authentically woolly as the period. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 314 pages
• Publisher: Subterranean Press; Reprint edition (August 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596063513
• ISBN-13: 978-1596063518
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,512,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars listen with your heart - you will understand October 4, 2003

By Alexander Gitlits

Format:Paperback

All right, I know it's strange to start speaking about a book, which touches upon the Doors, Beach Boys and Hendrix with a quote from a Disney song, but it IS an appropriate one.
Because this book is not only about music, but also about how we react to it, and how our life changes (maybe) because of music.
I'm too young to remember the 60s (being born in 1976), but this novel really fleshed out that era and its people for me. I think that for those, who really was there it will be even better.
Glimpses is not fantasy in ebveryday sence. I'd say it's magical realism, not unlike Jonathan Carrol or Haruki Murakami.
And the thing that makes it really great, is that it can convey to you the feeling of listening to the best music that never was, and I can't think of many authors who can wright about music so vividly. That's a tremendous achivement.
In short: this book lets you glimpse another world. And it as real as this one. I don't know how Mr. Shiner does it. It's a kind of magic

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it... February 6, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

If ever a book deserved to come back into print and stay in print, this is it. Lewis Shiner has written the great American rock and roll novel. Ray Shackleford has the ability to step into the past and call forth music that never was -- but should have been. His journey will be through both darkness and light, of self discovery and myth shattering. Like any good rock and roll tune, it is at once sad and joyous. The writing makes the time period he travels to (the 60's) so palpable, we feel as if we might walk around a corner and step into them ourselves. The scenes involving Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys' "lost" album Smile are alone worth any effort it might take to locate this book. In the song "American Pie", Don McLean posed the question: "Can music save your mortal soul?" If you read this novel, you will know without a doubt the answer is "Yes."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't get it out of my head... June 19, 2001

By Jennifer Saylor

Format:Paperback

I can't turn it off, turn it down, wash it off, or get it out of my head. This book has really gotten to me.

Did you ever notice how full of feeling some Beach Boys songs are? How "Good Vibrations" is a jolt of pure happiness and hope, a ray of sonic sunshine? This is a book for people who've noticed things like that. But "Glimpses" is much more than a love letter to great music or a document of the late sixties --it's a shamanic journey into human powers of healing, repair, and redemption through spiritual and emotional connection.

The book is actually set in the late eighties: Tienanmen Square, Lockerbie, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Milli Vanilli, Richard Marx, Martika... The ordinary-guy protagonist, stereo repairman Ray Shackleford, becomes able, through music, to enter altered states of consciousness and being--he closes his eyes, sinks into the music, and he's twenty years in the past, with the Beatles, with Jim Morrison, with Brian Wilson.

IMO, here's where the author turns what could have been a straightforward novel of time-travel into a shamanic journey of raw spiritual power--because it's NOT the past Ray is visiting, as his actions there never affect the present. I'd argue that he's entering the collective unconscious of our species--a sort of matrix of memory and desire. While in this realm of the unconscious, Ray Shackleford, music lover and accidental shaman, meets the musical gods of the late Sixties, on a mission to save their great works lost to mental illness or death. Instead of just repairing stereos, he tries to repair the past: the lost life, the lost futures, and the lost music.

Amazingly, the human drama of Ray's everyday life is even more compelling than his nonordinary travels. His personal journey is of equal importance to his musical journey, and mirrors the healing he undertakes in reshaping the past--dealing with the destructive emotional legacy of his dead father, and exploring, forming, and reforming his attachments to friends, lovers, and family. This isn't just a book about fantasy encounters with musical icons, about a music-lover's "rescue" of the great lost albums of the sixties. Primarily, it's a story of yearning and redemption in one human life. Read this book if you love the Beatles or the Yardbirds or Hendrix or the Beach Boys (especially the Beach Boys) or the Doors or Dylan or Janis or Love or Van Morrison or any of the great musical pioneers of that era, or any of the great musical pioneers of any era, anywhere. Read it if you are drawn to the unstable edges of human experience where reality and desire intersect, making beauty and pain and healing and fear and love and music. "Glimpses" is like nothing I've ever read before--simple, beautiful, powerful, moving, important, unpretentious, full of hope and life, yet unafraid of the terrible costs of growth and love and change. Almost nothing in the book is less than earned, or real, or right. This book is holy in its way, to me, a woman who loves music, a woman who has her own happy endings to hope for, her own journeys of redemption and growth to take.

This book deserves to stay in print forever. Like all beautiful things that do good in the world, it should never be lost.