Three Goat Songs
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Three Goat Songs" is a series of variations on a theme. It is divided into three novellas, each about a man who sits on a rocky coast by the seashore, contemplating. Herds of goats come there to graze. The man is a husband and father of two children.
"Three Goat Songs" is an exploration into the existential boundaries, in the "sea-bounded goat world." It is a philosophical look at the essential sameness and, at the same time, the diversity of all stories. It has in common with the other books of Michael Brodsky the theme of the protagonist's struggle to survive, and more than that, to comprehend.
Together, this body of work has led critics to compare the writing of Michael Brodsky to that of the masters like Dostoevsky, Becket, Joyce.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a theater of coastal rocks, before an audience of goats, a man tells his story--about the impossibility of telling his story. Like the rocks, which he describes both as faces and as anal, ``hair-clogged fissures,'' storytelling, he says, consists of fronts and rears, beginnings and ends. And language avails him no devices with which to connect these ``into some single statement worthy of a whole being.'' So the man refers to himself in this trilogy of novellas through a ``cento of butt-ends,'' a patchwork of scraps from others' tales. Brodsky craftily revises the ancient Greek term for tragedy--literally ``goat song.'' He writes not of the individual's flouting of order, the theme of tragedy, but of the individual's desire for order in a unified narrative of the self. Brodsky's prose seems to proceed from the very core of his character's thinking, ``from the site of its eruption.'' Its molten flow consumes all types of language--colloquialisms, legalese, and some eminently obscure vocabulary. The result is a vigorous, eccentric style that enables Brodsky ( Xman ) to bring a Swiftian gusto to the novel of ideas and write a challenging, at times dazzling book.
