The Nenoquich
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
An unsung masterpiece squatting in the ashes of the sixties, The Nenoquich is the diary of a seducer hammering on the walls of his own loneliness.
One day, eavesdropping on a phone call, Harold Raab, a writer with nothing to write, hears his roommate refer intriguingly to a woman Harold has never met. Curiosity leads to obsession and to an affair with the married Charlotte Cobin, all of which Harold faithfully records in the notebook that becomes his deeper obsession. As the relationship with Charlotte complicates and darkens, Harold’s poisons emerge. He’s discovered a subject he can write about, but now reveals himself as someone whose intelligence, wit, and sexual delirium mask a terror of human connection. Adrift in the ruins of 1970s Berkeley, he is—like the dark hero of a nineteenth century romance—disastrously unprepared for actual love, and even for life.
Originally published in 1982 under the title False Match, and long out of print, The Nenoquich is an unsparing, painful, and often very funny story of fading illusions. It captures a generation at sea, and a seducer out of his depth. This edition includes a new preface by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Screenwriter Bean's marvelous novel, first published in 1982 as False Match, is about a nenoquich—the ancient Mexican word for a lifelong loser, born under a bad sign. It's 1970, and wannabe writer Harold Raab, 26, is on the skids. He begs Penthouse magazine to give him an assignment, hangs out with his Berkeley, Calif., crew of fellow bohemians, and fills a notebook with their aimless adventures. His life acquires meaning when he meets the married Charlotte Cobin. Frustrated with her med student husband, whom Harold earnestly admires, she launches into a sexual relationship with Harold that brings him into unexpected mental contortions. "I was afraid of the fears ahead," Harold writes in his diary, his existential questions about the future making it difficult to be intimate. Charlotte's moods prove more than a match for the nervous Harold as they stumble from the bed to breakup to reconciliation, and he tries to figure out how to be a person ("Society is a language we all learn," he reflects). Tension develops not only through Harold's heartache and confusion, but in the fact that as his life crumbles, he finally has something to write about. Rediscovered, this stands as one of the great novels of adulthood's losing battles.
