The Lamentations of Julius Marantz [Paperback]

Marc Estrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2007

Marc Estrin follows another of his strange protagonists through a world troubled by what it knows and by how it applies that knowledge.



From the first page, we are plunged into a global riot of paranoia, joy, and fear. But something is sadly familiar here, perhaps because we have been taught to anticipate a world in which people suddenly fly off the planet. It might be The Rapture. Or it might be some violation of the force of gravity. Whatever it is, it's spreading madness, religious hysteria, and some truly formidable government powers.



The voice of these Lamentations is a sixty-something, club-footed scientist named Julius Marantz, an obsessive researcher who suffers from both forbidden knowledge and and insistent conscience. As his spirit and his heart begin to fail, Julius realizes what is lost to him: a childhood of possibility, the consolation of belief, and the undying optimism of a father who taught him the principles of physics on the roller coaster and the parachute jump.



Part a portrait of cynical politics and religious fervor, part scientific speculation and part meditation on the glories of Coney Island, The Lamentations of Julius Marantz traces the rise and fall of science ina truly personal story that finally fairly ascends.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Clubfooted, 60-something Cal Tech grad Julius Marantz is pursued by both the Central Intelligence Corporation and a corporate coalition known as GEKO in this Kafkaesque near-future mashup from Estrin (Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa). Julius's crimes include having perfected a mechanism known as the Doodad, which, among other things, polarizes the water molecules in living beings and is used to create rapture-like experiences among the multitudes of India. Julius cedes operating rights to the Doodad early on, and 200 pages of his kvetching reflections on his early life ensue. Born to wear a pocket protector and inspired by the exoticisms of Coney Island, Julius makes kid-genius forays into relativity; displays his mother's pickled appendix; and has his dog Yenta bark mitzvahed. His parents' fatal air accident leaves him with a sense of irretrievability that inspires research in magnetic fields at Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute and Cal Tech. With the Doodad in corporate hands, the world stands on the brink, threatened by way of product testing. Estrin's fantastical conceit conceals a very conventional story at its core, and neither one gets sufficient treatment. Scattered throughout this fourth novel are amusements, moving laments and inventive imaginings, but the narrative flow remains polarized. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont. He is the author of three previous novels: Insect Dreams: The half-life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, and Golem Song.

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961380
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961386
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,721,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont.

OR
Marc Estrin's world line approximates a cross between a fungal mycelium and a Rube Goldberg device. Biologist, theater director, EMT, Unitarian minister, physician assistant, puppeteer, political activist, college professor, cellist and conductor, he is baffling, even unto himself.

OR, Alternative:
Marc Estrin was hired to teach theater at Goddard College, but in this departmentless utopia, wound up also teaching music, writing, Finnegans Wake, math, physics, medical self-help and "crazy courses" like Philosophy for Dishwashers, an audio-based lecture/discussion series to sweeten the life of cafeteria volunteers. Such are the fruits of liberal education.

OR, Even more alternative:

Marc Estrin grew up in a small apartment so full of books you had to walk sideways in the hall. Of these, he read not one -- till age sixteen, when he gave up his literary virginity to Franz Kafka: The Trial was his introduction to the larger life. This explains much. A mediocre student in high school, he was teased by his father into reading The Magic Mountain during the summer before college. Epiphany! The book was for him a topo-map of western thought and culture. With Mann as his guide, he sailed through college and grad schools, making a Hegelian leap out of graduate science into the richer, if iffier area of the arts. The Vietnam war and Bertolt Brecht were his siren callers into political activity, and his professional theater work dissipated into organizing, college teaching and communal living. When these ceased to put food on the table, he reached back into a past life to study and practice medicine. With the computer came the possibility of writing without retyping -- a stimulus sufficient to have resulted in his current crop of manuscripts, published and unpublished.