Customer Reviews

Glimpses: A Novel

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

A well-written character-oriented sci-fi, rock & roll novel This is a great read for science fiction fans and rock and roll fans alike. A compelling story of a man's search for meaning in his life (and sorting out his relationship with his late father) set against a background of "Twilight Zone-ish" in nature. This is a highly enjoyable novel. If you're a music fan, don't let the sci-fi tag steer you away from this, and vice versa. I've read this twice, and plan to read it again!

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."

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.

The setting is 1989. The protagonist is Ray Shackleford, a man in his late thirties who is trying to deal with the death of his father, difficulties in his marriage, and a complex myriad of his own emotional inadequacies. But this typical narrative opening gets strange very quickly when Ray discovers that he has the ability to conjure lost songs and unfinished albums of great rock music icons of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Lewis Shiner's Glimpses is one of those successful genre-blend novels that are rare in contemporary fantasy. The book is sometimes about rock history and criticism--the magical influences of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, Jim Morrison, and the Beatles as well as the author's imagination about what influenced them to strike a chord or ink a lyric. The novel is also about the Freudian mind-mess sons inherit from their fathers. But these descriptions merely mash together what Shiner takes a great deal of care unfolding. The wonderful turns of phrases and sense of movement in the novel have a lyrical quality that does not alienate the reader but rather draws the reader in.

The book is currently out of print, but I hope you can find a copy here on Amazon or through your local library. The book won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for a reason. It's well-wrought prose, an intriguing fantasy story that relies on the Freudian rather than the Tolkien tradition, and it gives you that pleasure only fine novels can--moments when you must put the book down, stop, and think new and exciting thoughts.

For those who liked this book, I recommend Ken Grimwood's Replay. There's a similar kind of science fiction at work in Replay, that is, science fiction used to both rarify reality so that it doesn't appear mundane, and clarify reality so that it doesn't ultimately appear confusing and hopeless.

I was a little skeptical regarding this book when I first heard of it -- thinking how poorly executed the concept of traveling back in time and finishing "lost" rock classics could be in the hands of a hack or lousy writer. Instead, I find myself completely surprised and amazed that Shiner has pulled it off! He really brings alive LA in the 1960s, and makes you really feel that you are right there with Brian Wilson as he finally finishes "Smile" or hanging out on Sunset Strip with Jim Morrison on a drunken, wild bender....

This is a highly imaginative and creative book, taking a great concept and just executing it beautifully. On top of that, Shiner has weaved in a very moving story of personal redemption, a marriage on the rocks, and a sense that the ideals of the 60s have been lost or diluted through time, attrition, and missed opportunities.

If you have an interest in this subject matter, you will enjoy this book and turn every page with interest, waiting for the next flight of fancy of the very creative mind of Lewis Shiner.

I'm a bit of a Sci-Fi geek yet i had never even heard of this guy! I see on Amazon.com that he's written a fair bit of other stuff and i may just have to purchase some of them i think.
The most impressive thing about Glimpses was how knowledgable Shiner was on every topic he touched. I thought "this guy must be some rock-and-roll-mad, scuba-diving, electronics-fixing guy who just happened to write a great book about all the topics on which he's an expert."
I want to read another one of his books to see if they're all like that.

Jill likes this folk song that is quite appropriate for our generation. The song, written and sung by a Gen Xer, tells about how all the Baby Boomers tell her that "it must be sad to have been born a little late." Being born late, the Gen Xer missed out on so much: the Summer of Love, Peace Marches, etc. The Gen Xer thinks this is a load of crap and wishes the Baby Boomers would just get over it (and grow up, for chrissakes). I've expressed a similar sentiment before in these pages, but directed at the generation before the Boomers and their fixation on the crash of the American Pie and the loss of Valens et al. So when I say that I found this Boomer book--about how the music and culture of their collective childhood was so great--fabulous, you know that it faced a tough audience.

Glimpses does not hide the fact that it is about the 60s and rock music (given the demographics of the population, probably wise--there are a lot more reminiscing Boomers than fed-up Xers), and I likely took my time turning to it because it wore its influences on its jacket. I bought the book when it came out because I knew Lew Shiner from Austin and had all his other books. Lew's previous novels are kind of a mixed bag. His first, Frontera, was published by Baen, not your usual source for quality literature, and while enjoyable enough at the time, I'm not sure that Frontera has weathered quite as well as its cyberpunk contemporaries. In his second novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Lew's style and subject matter improved tremendously. In my internal cataloging schema, I tend to group Deserted Cities of the Heart with Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After and Karen Joy Fowler's Artificial Things. See the paradigm shift: from Cyberpunk to feminism in one novel. Deserted Cities of the Heart was still genre, however, and Lew totally dispensed with that in his third novel, Slam. It's not quite correct, but the voice in my head associates Slam with the line in Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" that goes "what's it like being a skate-boarding punk rocker." The writer's progress in the three novels is readily apparent, and I liked each succeeding book much more than its predecessors. But there was still that jacket painting of Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix prompting the irrational knee-jerk response.

Several things finally broke through my resistance, including Glimpses winning the World Fantasy Award, unsolicited comments and recommendations for the book from several First Impressions and Rondua members, and then it appeared in the middle of all the Anthony Powell that Alexandria Digital Literature recommends that I read. A long plane trip to New Jersey was the final straw.

I started reading it hesitantly, then slowly relaxed and started enjoying it rather than dreading it. By the time I got to page 50 I had to close the book and let the wave of "good vibrations" flow over me before continuing. It did not matter that I had waited three years before reading this--everything was alright in the world because I was only a sixth of the way into a book that I knew was my type of novel and I did not have to worry about stopping reading for at least 2,000 miles.

Glimpses is about the late 60s, but it is much more about the late 80s and one man's relation to both decades, his father and his wife. Ray Shackleford repairs stereos in Austin, his father has just died, and he is starting to realize that his marriage is falling apart and that he is an alcoholic. Escaping from it all, he sits in his repair shop imagining what things would be like if things had been different. If he could have understood his father. If the Beatles had not broken up. If that aborted session that would have been their last studio album had actually come about. And then there it is, coming from his radio: "The Long and Winding Road." But not the over-produced, orchestrated version that we are familiar with, but a more basic version. Something that was not supposed to exist.

It is a fantasy novel, no doubt about that, but the ready acceptance of the fantastic by the characters means Glimpses is more kin to Borges or Carroll (i.e., magic realism) than Feist or Eddings. While the fantastic elements are fun and Shiner does a superb job of re-creating the atmospheres of the recording sessions, it is Ray, his friendships and his family relationships that drive you to keep reading. Before you are halfway through this novel, you want happiness for Ray, but know that there will be a lot of pain and suffering before he will achieve peace. And you know that his power to re-create music that never was will be as much a danger to him as a gift.

Glimpses has my highest recommendation, and given a sufficient waiting period, will likely be on my list of Top 10 favorite novels.

This is a wonderful book about a late 80s stereo repairman (Ray) who discovers that he can, through some kind of power of imagination and love of music, actually cause lost albums to come to be. A musical trip through the late 60s (The Beatles, The Doors, Brian Wilson) as Ray re-lives both his own youth and the time and character of the musicians who made the music which provided the soundtrack to a tumultuous era. In the present, Ray is dealing with the death of his distant father, the tenuous threads which hold his marriage together, and coming to terms and some form of understanding with both. Stefan Rudnicki's narration is (as always) rich and resonant, capturing's Ray's voice and grounding the book in a dry, gravelly bass which suits it perfectly. This is an authentic book of a time that was and of timeless music that almost was, and true human characters moving between them. I enthusiastically recommend it.

The first three years after discovering Glimpses by Lewis Shiner I read it once a year, which doesn't happen to me very often in reading a book.

Ray Shackleford is a stereo repairman with problems. A father with whom he had a contentious relationship has died under mysterious circumstances, his marriage is unraveling like a ball string in his fingers and he can't quite grasp the threads to pull it back together, a burgeoning drinking problem, and a career as a rock star that never got started much less going anywhere. But he has discovered a means of escape, by retreating into the past, and not just any past, he retreats to the 60's to help the idols of his Rock `n' Roll dreams reclaim what they've lost, their lost albums. Brian Wilson's Smile, Jim Morrison and The Celebration of the Lizard, and Jimi Hendrix's The First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

I first read this book because I was looking for a nice escapist book to lose myself in for a few hours. I found that. The more I read the more I found myself drawn in, especially to Ray's trips to the past, his getting drawn into Brian Wilson's family, living the Rock `n' Roll lifestyle with Jim Morrison as his guide, and Ray's truly heartbreaking attempts to keep Jimi Hendrix from dying. The question is will these trips to the past help Ray heal the same issues he has in his life?

There is the element of time travel in this book. Is Ray really going back into the past and meeting his idols? Or is he suffering a series of strokes? Glimpses offers evidence of both, giving the reader the choice of which is truly occurring.

On each reading of Glimpses, I found something new in it, some nuance previously undiscovered. I guess one could say that is due to the changing circumstances of my life. But isn't that the mark of any good book? That we can find something new in it from whatever perspective in life we are coming at it?