Gone Tomorrow
A novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York, Munich and Cartagena, Colombia are the scenes of reckless decadence and excess in the early dawn of the AIDS epidemic, as recounted in this ambitious, uneven chronicle of a charismatic gay filmmaker's final years. Two friends of the late Paul Grosvener meet in New York in 1991 and discuss, over cocktails and joints, circumstances that led to his somewhat mysterious death. The narrative flashes back seven years to Cartagena, where Paul is directing a movie. Surrounded by corruption and poverty, stultified by excessive heat, drugs, liquor and sex, a motley crew of ex-Nazis, native Colombians, cosmopolitan actors and ``cinema types''--narcissists and grotesques--butt heads as they struggle to bring Paul's obscure vision to the screen. The second part of the novel recounts Paul's lover's horrible death from AIDS, Paul's own contraction of the virus, and the intrigue of his suicide. Indiana ( Horse Crazy ) frustrates the reader with his inconsistent first-person narrative. Contemplating life in the face of death he presents keen insights both through symbolism and through overt discussion; but at times his prose becomes overburdened with ostentatious mixed metaphors and almost Chandleresque similes that create an incongruous, mocking tone. Reminding us that he is not omniscient, Indiana's narrator disrupts his own story with frequent asides. Still, this is an intelligent, evocative treatment of an all too timely and difficult subject.
