|
|||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
The Genius of the Sea : A Novel by Naeem Murr  (4)
|
The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) by Anne Enright  (111)
$11.20
|
Just when you think, a bit mournfully, that this delicious nightmare of a novel has come to an end, you remember the first chapter, addressed by "I" to "you." "I" boasts of a self-effacement from the story so artful that we readers may notice only "the vaguest scar" of the narrator upon the body of the story. Of so many characters so well drawn, given the brevity of the book, whom might the speaker be? Have we, too, fallen prey to the wiles of the eponymous, much-aliased and entirely shameless Boy?
Thank god the mystery persists. If the houselights rose too quickly, returning us to an unequivocal world, it would refute what's uniquely pleasurable about Naeem Murr's wickedly intelligent tale--its moral, aesthetic, erotic, and narrative ambiguities; a sullen lyricism that simultaneously obfuscates and illumines; a way of sprouting what feel like fully human characters from a yeasty compost of filial guilt and sexual desire. This story--foster father Sean Hennessey's quest for his estranged "son"--doesn't unfold so much as it refolds, reveals, revises a story that has already, in "real" time, begun with a sexual misadventure, proceeded through a series of betrayals and seductions, and ended with a number of bodies strewn along the Thames and through the English countryside, visiting the sins of the sons upon the fathers in a wonderfully Kafkaesque way.
If The Boy has a flaw, it is those glimpses of Freud's shadow sometimes visible in the story's brighter moments, but this is a tiny complaint measured against a work whose thrills derive from the terrible astuteness of its psychology. --Joyce Thompson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A man combs the London slums for the foster child who destroyed his family in this overwrought, strangely original debut. Haunted by the disgrace of his father's alcoholism, Birmingham's Sean Kennedy grows up determined to distinguish himself in liberal politics and enters government as a social worker. After a secret transgression demolishes his self-respect, he atones by taking Durward?the charismatic, orphaned adolescent son of a client?home to live with his wife and children. Durward, however, proves to be a supremely troubled youngster with several personalities and identities. After causing the Kennedy family irreparable harm, he runs away for a life of prostitution. Sean's hunt for the boy leads him to the Churchill Home for Boys in Battersea, where Sean tries to piece his own life back together by having a love affair with one of the eccentric employees before finally facing his sociopathic foster son. Murr's characters seduce each other and explain themselves with operatic gusto: they seem to communicate in arias. This is especially true of the epicene, Nietzsche-spouting Durward, a pied piper who, wherever he roams, charms men, women and children into high-camp crimes of passion. As in old-fashioned gothic novels, the implausibility of the plot and characters reflect a compelling psychological truth that lurks somewhere beneath the clunky melodramatic machinery. If the results are sometimes messy, they never fail to interest or intrigue. Author tour; rights: Ellen Levine; British rights: Fourth Estate; German rights: Luchterhand. (May) FYI: Born in London and of Irish and Lebanese descent, Neem currently lives in Houston.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
