Question 7
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP TEN NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR PRIX FÉMINA ETRANGER • LONGLISTED FOR PRIX MÉDICIS • An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times
"Spectacular. . . A book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life...
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker Prize winner Flanagan (Toxic) weaves strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb into a mesmerizing narrative tapestry in this dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir. Flanagan begins with a meditation on how his father was interned in a Japanese POW camp near Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb. He considers how the experience shaped his father into a man who saw life as a "great tragicomedy." He contrasts his father with his more passionate mother, and reflects on the ways their combined "life force" saw them through poverty and pain. His examination of their relationship leads him to the affair between British writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and then to Wells's writings on the atom bomb. Further digressions delve into Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard's warnings against nuclear energy, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and Tasmania's colonial history; recurring themes of mortality culminate in a recollection of Flanagan's near-drowning at the age of 21. Lyrical prose ("He would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants") complements the book's oblique structure, aiding Flanagan in his construction of a bracing dreamscape that blends fiction, family, and history to illuminate his captivating consciousness. This is masterful.
