Zinsky the Obscure
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
If your childhood is brutal, your adulthood becomes a daily attempt to recover: a quest for ecstasy and stability in recompense for their early absence.” So states the 30-year-old Ariel Zinsky, whose bachelor-like lifestyle belies the torturous youth he is still coming to grips with. As a boy, he struggles with the beatings themselves; as a grownup, he struggles with the world’s indifference to them. Zinsky the Obscure is his life story, a humorous chronicle of his search for a redemptive ecstasy through sex, an entrepreneurial sports obsession, and finally, the cathartic exercise of writing it all down.
Fervently recounting both the comic delights and the frightening horrors of a life in which he feels – always – that he is not like all the rest, Zinsky survives the worst and relishes the best with idiosyncratic style, as his heartbreak turns into self-awareness and his suicidal ideation into self-regard. A vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of lust and ambition – and the forces that drive them – Zinsky the Obscure is a novel of extraordinary zeal, range, and power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This eloquent novel from Mochari probes an angry young man's struggles with identity and emotional stability after an abusive childhood. When 30-year-old New Yorker Ariel Zinsky isn't indulging in marijuana, spectator sports, and masturbation, he thinks of writing his memoir. Marriage and fatherhood are his two big taboos, prisms through which he rationalizes his anti-social behavior. His crude father Robert, a software executive, abused Ariel and his passive mother Barbara, a high-school teacher, for years. After his parents divorce, Ariel turns to his mother for a "true best friend" before leaving home for the University of Michigan. Meanwhile Barbara dates and eventually marries Neil, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, and Ariel gains a loyal confidante in step-sister Nicole. At college, Ariel slaves away to make an NFL draft guide lucrative, wrecks his first relationship with jealousy, and almost drowns his cancer-ridden father. His next two attempts at relationships, first with a well-grounded Harvard student and later with an older lawyer, also fail, stemming from Ariel's intractable unwillingness to commit. By the age of 30, the unlikable Zinsky has built himself a shallow, sterile existence with little prospects of future joy. Mochari's debut novel is both bleak and affecting.
