kiwi wrote:

I bought this partly because he is Australian and lauded world wide.  "One of the 50 most important writers in the world - Lire"  Hard to walk by that one...
The book, and probably he,  is more American than Australian.  It's set in New York and is about disenfranchised people.
Its fabulous. I have been reading fantasy and sic fi and pure old fashioned adventure.  I was over literary.  This book is the most compelling I've read in years. And its genre is literary.   
This is how its done.

Do yourself a favour and read it.

kiwi

I saw this, kiwi, and went to Amazon to read reviews of it. I put it on my wish list. It'll be the next thing I buy for my Kindle. I want to wait until I've finished a couple of other stories I've started to read.

Below is a link to reviews of it. I'm turned on even by the 2-star review it gets. I like to encourage books that are longer than they need to be to satisfy America's affection for the 15-second soundbite.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Street-Sweepe … ewpoints=1

Memphis

kiwi wrote:

You will be rewarded Memphis.  Make it sooner rather than later.  I tell you,  I have many opened yet unread books of excellent repute on my bedside table.  This one I can't stop reading.  And the writing is so good.
Now I want to know the books that keep you from it?  Do tell..

I'm reviewing an ARC of THE REVISED FUNDAMENTALS OF CAREGIVING by Jonathan Evison to be published on 28 August by Algonquin Books. I'll let you know after I review it whether I recommend it enough to buy it.

For recreation, I just read a ponderous biography of Mark Twain that gave me a different side of Twain than I knew of.

The best thing I've read lately was Dead Souls by Gogol. For the third time.

I quit reading Arcadia http://www.amazon.com/Arcadia-Lauren-Gr … ewpoints=1 by Lauren Groff  half way through. Beautifully written but too indulgent by half. She kept throwing water under the wheels of her metaphors when she could have used a shovelful of sand. The story spun its wheels too long for my tastes.

I don't speak lightly when I say Ms Groff writes beautifully and at another time, I may have breezed merrily through the story. In some ways her writing reminded me of Gregory David Roberts' writing in Shantaram. When her metaphors hit they'd take your breath away, when they didn't they seemed like strutting.

I also just finished reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. Every time I've managed to finish that book, I've liked it better than the time before, but I won't pretend it's not a chore.

Memphis

Last edited by Memphis Trace (05-22-2012 06:52:05)

kiwi,

My review of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison:

Benjamin Benjamin is not finished with his former life but his estranged wife, the family’s provider—when they were a family with two children—is.

At his apartment—or compartment as he calls it—he has a children-shaped black hole into which his estranged wife’s love was sucked. He aggressively avoids service of divorce papers to keep alive the hope of regaining her love.

A college dropout, stay-at-home dad, Ben takes a 28-hour class in caregiving that teaches him how to insert catheters, avoid liability, and how to avoid taking his job home with him.

On an unlikely road trip with Trevor, his teenage MD patient, pursued across several states by a process server (he thinks), he learns—first to care for--and then to reconnect with others. The story wends among flashbacks with his children and real time without them, ever mindful of the disaster that took them.
 
Episodes of Ben’s past and present are strung taut with humor and hope, but don’t get too happy, the next page may reveal the particulars of the disaster. Every time Ben takes his children to feed the ducks or to the mall or to get-togethers…

The drumbeat of Evison’s reminder of The Disaster threatens to make into a run-of-the-mill page turner this story of the redemptive power of caregiving. In the end, the workshop device fails to do more than annoy: the grain of sand that annoys into being the pearl of hope caring brings?

Memphis Trace

Last edited by Memphis Trace (11-24-2012 06:50:11)