ABC
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An original and radiant novel about grief, obsession, and the need for meaning from the author of The Family, a finalist for the National Book Award.When his young son dies in a freak accident, Gerard struggles to find a reason in the smallest of details, including the scrap of paper containing the Sanskrit alphabet that is found at the site. Latching on to this final “clue,” he delves into the origins of Indo-European alphabets, his fascination taking him to England, Greece, and finally, to an ancient site in the Syrian desert where the alphabet was born some 4000 years ago. Along the way he meets other grieving parents, who accompany him on a journey that extends beyond historical knowledge and right into the heart of love and loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two mysteries obsess Gerard Chauvin, protagonist of this overwrought novel. The first is the mystery of his six-year-old son Harry's tragic death. The second, onto which he deflects his grief, is the obscure question of why the alphabet came to be ordered in its familiar sequence of letters. A series of unsettling coincidences leads him to Syrian ruins and to other lost souls a Chinese woman whose daughter overdosed on heroin, a Greek Jew whose wife was murdered by terrorists seeking enlightenment in the alphabet. Assisted by a dotty Cambridge scholar, they plunge into the ancient arcana of writing, as if in the origins of letters they could find both a way to communicate their sorrow and a hidden meaning behind the seemingly arbitrary happenstances of life and death. Plante (The Family) imparts an eeriness to his prose Gerard feels the shades of the dead crowding about him but often lapses into inchoate mysticism: "we can only have an impression of everything all together and can never understand everything all together, because everything all together, everything in the world all together, is an impossibility." From the abstruse intellectual quest his characters embark upon, the reader doesn't get a firm sense of the emotional burden they are carrying.
