Fredy Neptune
A Novel in Verse
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Overwhelmingly readable ... lyrical, meditative, ironical, funny or dramatic, Murray plays on an inexhaustible keyboard; he even reinvents it." - Claudio Gorlier, La Stampa
Fredy Boettcher is no visionary. He embodies reaction, the humane sort most people have when brought up against the horror which visions and causes may bring. In World War I Turkey, the sight of women being burned alive by a mob causes him to lose his sense of touch, as if he were burned himself. He must conceal and try to use this curse-gift over much of his subsequent life, which involves travels around the world, including to Hollywood, Arabia and Hitler's Germany.
Deliberately cast in non-literary language, Les Murray's profound study of moral shock teases out the potentials for peace, still not fully realised, which lie in multiculture and mixed heritage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australia's best-known poet has surpassed himself: this entertaining, sprawling, serious novel-in-verse is the best thing Murray (Subhuman Redneck Poems) has written. His expansive, colloquial free verse and eight-line stanzas--sometimes chewily irregular, sometimes conversationally fluent--hide their verbal subtleties in order to hook readers on character and plot. After Freddy Boettcher, an Australian sailor of German descent, sees women burnt alive in Turkey in WWI, he develops psychosomatic leprosy. When he recovers he has gained superstrength but lost his sense of touch. Over the next 30 years he visits (mostly unwillingly) Constantinople, Egypt, Jerusalem, Queensland, Paris, Kentucky, Hollywood, Switzerland, Nazi Germany, Sydney, Shanghai and New Guinea; meets (among others) Lawrence of Arabia, Chaim Weizmann, Marlene Dietrich, the mad-scientist aesthete Basil Thoroblood and the hermaphrodite ex-artilleryman "Leila, now Leland" Golightly; wrestles a "poor opium-mad bear"; inspires the creators of Superman; and becomes a reporter, a circus strongman, a fisherman, a father, a swamp-dredger, a hobo, a movie actor and a Zeppelin crewman, mostly while trying to get home to his wife. Fred's first-person story, "big, dangerous, baggy," makes him a (literally) numb modern Everyman and a spokesman for tough-minded, populist pacifism: "There were no sides for me: both were mine. I'd seen them both." He also defends masculinity, saving a retarded German from castration by bringing him to Australia. If Murray's first verse-novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, struck many readers as sexist, this one will not. Fredy Neptune overflows with story; the roller-coaster stanzas stay clear and memorable: "I leaped up, healthy again, and gravity hung my boots downwards." Murray's deliberately talky, ungainly style can disfigure his shorter poems; it's perfect, though, for this eventful, globe-trotting--and, it turns out, deeply Catholic--modern epic, linked almost equally to Homer's Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Regained and Lucas and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Customer Reviews
A quirky ride
An odd story. Told in a strange way. A creative masterpiece in both imagination and in capturing historical events through Australians of the past fabled century. Through hardships and ideas we no longer live, Fredy Neptune can remind Australians the true hero remains empathetic and sensitive to those less able and less fortunate. Told with real feeling when there seems to be none.
The author's note at the end is a delight but only if you have read through the whole story.
I would also suggest reading some of Les' poetry first to appreciate how many meanings can be carried on a few conspiring lines of text.