Life on Sandpaper
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A whirlwind of art, music, and lust, Life on Sandpaper is Yoram Kaniuk's overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the '50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra. In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that was Greenwich Village. Kaniuk's stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this were his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The autobiographical latest from acclaimed Israeli novelist Kaniuk (after The Last Jew) is a masterwork of technical virtuosity and tough sentiment. Wounded in Israel's 1948 war, narrator Kaniuk arrives in New York penniless and decides to become a painter. Settling in Greenwich Village, his circle includes Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, James Dean, Tennessee Williams, and Marlon Brando, but Kaniuk never loses sight of his minor role in their stories: "I was in the lives of these people by mistake." Kaniuk marries a Broadway dancer and finds excitement everywhere, whether it's pretending to be a Soviet defector to score a dance with Ginger Rogers, or spontaneously pitching a film director. But the wonder is tempered by a tough streak: Kaniuk often behaves badly, and these lapses pass without introspection; even when his frequently betrayed wife lays out his faults, Kaniuk refuses to own or reject the problem. He's equally unforgiving with others: Wally Cox and Miles Davis are depicted as monsters; novelist James Jones is portrayed as sentimental and na ve. An essential novel about boho New York, this is not to be missed.
