The Traymore Rooms
A Novel in Five Parts
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A MILLIONS.COM MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2013
A HYPOALLERGIC FALL LITERARY RELEASE TO KNOW ABOUT
“Norm Sibum is not everyone's cup of tea ... instead of breathing air he inhales the exhaust of apocalyptic times.”—Books in Canada
A place: the Traymore Rooms, downtown Montreal, an old walk-up. Those who live there and drink at the nearby café form the heart of Traymorean society. Their number includes: Eggy, red-faced, West Virginian, a veteran of Korea; Eleanor R (not Eleanor Roosevelt); Dubois, French Canadian, optimist; Moonface, waitress-c*m-Latin-scholar and sexpot inexpert; and, most recently, our hero Calhoun. A draft dodger and poetical type.
For a time all is life-as-usual: Calhoun argues with Eggy and Dubois, eats Eleanor’s cobblers, gossips of Moonface, muses on Virgil and the current President. With the arrival of a newcomer to Traymore, however, Calhoun’s thoughts grow fixated and dark. He comes to believe in the reality of evil. This woman breaks no laws and she inflicts no physical harm—yet for the citizens of Traymore, ex-pats and philosophers all, her presence becomes a vortex that draws them closer to the America they dread.
Intelligent and frighteningly absurd, with a voice as nimble as Gass’s and satire that pierces like Wallace’s, The Traymore Roomsis a sustained howl against libertarianism under George W. Bush.
Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. The Traymore Rooms is his first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Traymore Rooms apartments offer refuge to a variety of colorful characters, as recorded by narrator ex-pat draft dodger Calhoun. Approaching the end of their lives, with little to offer the world except disassociated political rants and convoluted interpersonal rivalries, the older members of the community hit on long-suffering waitresses, argue over politics and observe as others play musical beds, ever aware that death is approaching. Calhoun himself is implausibly attractive to a wide variety of women, from youthful Moonface to experienced Eleanor; he eschews the opportunities this offers him and is outright hostile to newcomer Margery Prentiss for reasons unclear. Like their tirades, the book in which these characters are trapped sometimes seems endless, situations shifting through a kaleidoscope of events dissimilar on the surface but identical in their basics. One unifying theme is the narrow keyhole through which Calhoun and his male chums peer at the women around them, relentlessly assessing them in terms of allure, affronted whenever one of the objects of desire expresses urges and ambitions not defined by those of the men. Although the individual men have their charms, the overall effect is to present them as self-absorbed sexist relics of a now vanished age, theatrical figures who will vanish having achieved little.
