This is a book like no other! With its first sentences, it gripped me, and I couldn't put it down till the very end. The same happened to everybody I recommended it to.
Formally, it is part of a trilogy, and I loved to read all three of them. Its style is dry and almost merely reporting, and yet it is emotionally involved in a powerful way.
Is what we are told meant to be real? Or is it only the product of a traumatized mind trying to cope with war, poverty, pain, abuse, and the endless yearning for what is lost? Are the twins, the protagonists of this trilogy, really two separate fictional characters or rather one with a dissociated mind? A thrilling question till the end.
Twin brothers, left with their evil grandmother at a time when war has blurred all distinctions between good and evil, learn to steal and kill in the name of survival and create their own loveless morality
This poignant story captured me: Henry Preston Standish, a single traveler on a cruise ship between Honolulu and Panama, unnoticed by anybody, slips on wet planks and falls into the Pacific Ocean. As his steamboat is further and further gliding away, Standish works on staying afloat. He is convinced he will be missed and the boat will return to rescue him.
The author moves back and forth between Standish's thoughts about his life and his impending rescue and the people on board who notice his absence without suspecting any emergency. I was very moved following how Standish's hopes fade and how he comes to grips with remaining and dying alone in the middle of the ocean, as its author did many years later in the middle of Manhattan.
Out of print for over seventy years, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis is being rescued for today's readers to launch Boiler House Press's new series, Recovered Books. Halfway between Honolulu and Panama, a man slips and falls from a ship. For crucial hours, as he patiently treads water in hope of rescue, no one on board notices his absence. By the time the ship's captain is notified, it may be too late to save him...
Rediscovered in 2009 by Brad Bigelow as part of tireless research for his popular Neglected Books website, Gentleman Overboard has since achieved the status…
This is the fascinating tale of what goes on in the minds of twin girls in the first year of their lives. As they watch, play, and listen, the world slowly opens to them in curious and mysterious ways. Most importantly, the words appear and attach themselves to things, people, and actions.
Louise Glück, who in 2020 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poetry, articulates in poetic prose fragments how an emerging mind may experience the world as an amazing ensemble of original appearances and peculiar events whose truth and existence can be accepted or simply rejected. The pensive plainness of this account invited me to look at many things anew and with a smile.
Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise Glück.
“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.
Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father…
If Fellini met Kafka, the comical side with the darkness of the absurd, then you would enter the world of the main character, Sine, who spends some time at a remote hotel, where things are strange yet revealing, and where she can move with ease and wonder through the memories and fantasies of the people who are or were with her: Her mother who just passed away, her late father, her sister, her husband, friends and colleagues and an unknown small child that gets attached to her. A book to dream with, to smile at and be puzzled, and to get to love the wanderings of the mind.
