Ray of the Star [Paperback]

Laird Hunt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009

Set in a dream-like European city reminiscent of Barcelona, along a boulevard teeming with artists who perform as living statues, comes the beautiful and frightening story of a man running from his past, a woman consumed by grief, and the forces that pursue them both.

New to the city, Harry is drawn to the boulevard, and particularly to Solange, a silent, silver angel awash in Lucite tears and heartbreak. Haunted by his own mysterious tragedy but determined to woo her, Harry visits Almundo’s Store for Living Statues and begins his transformation into the golden “Knight of the Woeful Countenance.”

A love story related in the dark, stylish noir of continental cinema and overlaid with a patina of surrealism, this is a novel where friends are also informers, street theater is the lifeblood of culture, and refuge can be found in the belly of a yellow, papier mâché submarine.

As the lovers reckon with seers offering answers to insoluble questions, neighbors who take evening strolls with the dearly departed, critics who control more than artistic fate, and shoes determined to lead their wearers astray, they come to understand the price of survival and what it means to travel along the ray of the star.

Called “one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today” by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of three previous, genre-bending novels: The Impossibly, The Exquisite, and Indiana, Indiana. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hunt (Indiana, Indiana) delivers a fourth novel about drifters that unfortunately never wanders into particularly interesting territory. Unable to find meaning in his life and suffering from a nasty bout of restless leg syndrome, Harry returns to Barcelona, where he once spent a few happy months. At a cafe, a stranger, Ireneo, beckons him to follow, and Harry soon realizes that Ireneo is really after one of the living statues who perform for the tourists, a sad-looking girl in an angel costume. Smitten with the girl, Harry decides to become a living statue of Don Quixote complete with golden body paint designed to attract her interest. Meanwhile, Ireneo, sidetracked by his mother's sudden illness, searches for the angel while imagining that he is being pursued by ghosts. While lyrically written, the origin of Harry's malaise is never made clear, and an attempt to fuse his meanderings over the city with the metaphysical explorations of his fellow lost souls is where the novel badly stumbles, leaving strands of the early plot dangling over a sour mishmash of unexplainable sadness. (Sept.)
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About the Author

Called "one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today" by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of three previous, genre-bending novels: The Impossibly, The Exquisite, and Indiana, Indiana. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566892325
• ISBN-13: 978-1566892322
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,654,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars No beacon and no light with this ray., January 25, 2010

By 

Poppy J. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ray of the Star (Paperback)

Ray of the Star, by Laird Hunt is a book for anyone interested in experiencing a new genre. This story begins with Harry who is looking to begin an "assault" on his own life. He meets Alfonso who finds Solange, then, he also finds Solange himself. Solange is a street performer who works as a living statue. Harry is inspired to also be a living statue and he tries his best to make it work out. Solange has a violent past, or it is alluded that she has had a tragic past, the reader is never 100% sure what really happened. One thing is for certain, Harry is a lost soul, and is desperately trying to manage his life, and for that the reader can hope for the best that it will work out for him in the end.

The story is written in stream of consciousness style, with one sentence going on for ages and ages - literally for several pages. If this is your cup of tea, then the book will be for you. If you crave a period and a lucid thought now and again, this book will be a bit of a frustration, through and through. Harry goes to the vintage clothing store, buys a bell, meets a woman on a plane...I am constantly looking for meaning in his actions and am not rewarded with any. The book is difficult to follow, but in the end, Harry is a bit of a likeable character. Whatever you can get from the book will have to be enough, although you might end with a feeling of wanting more. Or you will just end the book not wanting Harry to fail, as I did. Either way, you will get through the book and be the better for it. And that is the point of all fiction, isn't it?

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique, disturbing, phantasmagoric love story redolent of works by Jose Saramago, Paul Auster, and David Lynch, February 6, 2010

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ray of the Star (Paperback)

After spending years devastated by a tragedy whose precise nature is not revealed until the novel's last section, Harry flees to a splendid, labyrinthine, eerie European city to begin anew his "assault on life." He's not there for very long before his grief is distracted by the sight of an "unusually handsome woman with flecks of silver paint on her face," who is sitting alone in a cafe, and by Ireneo, a "tall, elegantly dressed man with extraordinary turquoise eyes and cheekbones that look like they could break razors." Ireneo convinces an initially reluctant Harry to accompany him to a baffling ritual, but it soon transpires that it's all a mistake--the beautiful messenger was supposed to summon the painted woman instead. Yet after Harry is sent on his way, he becomes obsessed with finding either of the other two and solving both the mystery of what he had experienced and the identity of the strange woman who, we soon learn, is recovering from a tragedy of her own.

Hunt adapts many influences and weaves them into something utterly unique. As critic James Gibbons points out in the BookForum review that led me to purchase this novel, the chapter-long sentences strikingly echo Jose Saramago's prose; likewise, the never-identified city (Barcelona?) recalls Saramago's Lisbon. The widower Harry is oddly reminiscent of the widower David Zimmer, whose escape into silent movies and subsequent dream-like journey similarly rescues him from overwhelming grief in Paul Auster's "Book of Illusions." There are David Lynch-inspired ceremonies conducted by an elderly woman who may or may not be a psychic, Thomas Pynchon-like running shoes that talk to their owner, and a Peter Max-influenced yellow submarine--plus a store selling costumes for city inhabitants who want to try their luck working as "living statues," an elderly neighbor who waits for visits from her dead husband, and a trio of old yet ageless men whose coarse sarcasm and thug-like trash-talk barely disguise their true nature as representatives of death.

The novel alternates between humor and dread to build a suspense that carries the story to a climatic confrontation that is both absurd and numinous yet ends up making a weird and disturbing kind of sense. And, in spite of the sentences that range over several pages and the seemingly nonsensical twists in the plot, "Ray of the Star" is a surprisingly easy and lyrical read (I've read it twice now and loved it even more the second time). Readers looking for novels that push the envelope of the traditional narrative are sure to enjoy this slim book, at once an enchanting love story and a taut work of fantasy.