Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Summer Reading
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store. |
Gob's Grief opens with the story of Tomo, the fictional son of Woodhull. At age 11, he dreams of escaping Homer, Ohio, to join the fighting. Unable to convince his twin brother, Gob, to accompany him, Tomo finally sets out alone and is promptly killed by a bullet through the skull. His twin never recovers from this loss. In thrall to his grief, Gob grows up to become a doctor, dedicating himself to healing the war's wounded. And by night, he toils away at a more unlikely corrective: a time machine that will eradicate death and bring back all the lost soldiers. His sidekick in this project is none other than Whitman, who shares his desire to resurrect those millions of departed souls: "Their marvelous passion would go out from them in waves, transforming time, history, and destiny, unmurdering Lincoln, unfighting the war, unkilling all the six hundred thousand."
Gob's Grief is an ambitious and occasionally convoluted story, which remains true to the stubborn mysticism of thinkers like Whitman and Woodhull. Cutting back and forth between characters and historical moments, Adrian never pretends to retrospective detachment. Indeed, his novel will appeal to fans of John Dos Passos or E.L. Doctorow--writers who borrow from history but repay their debt in the form of fictional insight. --Ellen Williams --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Some of the characters in Gob's Grief are extraordinarily compelling creations, particularly the Urfeist, and Pickie Beecher. I recommend this book with the caveat that it is not for the faint of heart or those unwilling to suspend disbelief. Certainly, I'll be very interested to see what Chris Adrian does next. For a first novel, this is an impressive debut.
GOB'S GRIEF is a strikingly emotional and original novel, set in a time when Americans were seemingly drowning in anguish, desperately trying to make sense of a country that had turned on itself. Elements of romance, history, horror, spiritualism and magic realism are ambitiously combined, with mixed results--sometimes the book feels repetitious and overstuffed, and some elements simply never quite manage to fit. However, as a whole, this is a memorable debut novel from a talented writer. I'll be looking for his name again.