Crustaceans
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
It is December 22nd, a foot of snow has fallen, and Paul is heading out for a small coastal resort on his son Euan's sixth birthday. Shall I tell you a story? he says and recalls the boy's birth, his first words and steps, all the stuff of forgetting, of any boy's life...
But nothing, Paul has decided, should ever be lost or discarded or buried, as it was in his own childhood. And so he confides the history of his relationship with Ruth, Euan's mother; the death of his own mother when he himself was a boy; and his father's refusal ever to explain what occurred. It soon becomes evident, however, that Euan is not in the car. Evident, too, that Paul is living alone, and that in the cliffs and dunes of the seaside resort lies the key to his story's conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unspecified tragedy shadows this quietly poignant novel, which unfolds in flashbacks as its narrator drives toward the English coast on a snowy December day. Paul, a potter, is mentally addressing his young son, Euan, as he drives, telling his own history and also remembering the first five and a half years of Euan's life. As a boy, Paul is brought up by his father, a self-absorbed sculptor; his mother killed herself when Paul was Euan's age. His grandmother and grandfather offer him a kind of shelter, but not until he meets his future wife, Ruth, in art school is he the recipient of true affection. With a clear and lucid eye, Cowan limns a collection of short, significant moments in Paul's life, which define him as a man, lover and father. Like many men, Paul measures the value and richness of his life against the lives of his father and grandfather, seeking both similarities and differences that could yield up new revelations in his existential quest. If Cowan (Pig; Common Ground) sometimes lulls the reader with cozy, tender vignettes like snapshots in a dog-eared photo album, there's a mounting sense of dread throughout, leading to a terrifying scene of sudden loss. While the source of Paul's frenzied grief can be intuited early on, the ambiguous ending comes close to melodrama. Even so, the reader's attention is captured not so much by one significant moment as by the narrative's accumulated force and momentum, which, as in life, overwhelms and makes this book memorable and engrossing.
