[sic]
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A searingly honest, heartbreaking work of genius, this is a book about music, poetry, devastating illness, creativity, sex and drugs, and twenty-something life in New York
'Writing this rawly self-conscious has no business captivating you, let alone moving you. That it manages to do it anyway is a testament to Mr. Cody's talent, honesty, and singularity' Jonathan Franzen
'The memoir of the year. It's a sensorium, and a painful one, a book in which the sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes ... He has a blazing intellect and can really write' New York Times, Books of the Year
Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant.
In a fevered, mesmerising voice, slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones and Beethoven, in a memoir that is as fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing he charts the struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, the ruthless grasping for life, for sensation.
Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language music and life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a pulled muscle in his neck led him to go to the doctor, Cody, a music composer, found out he had a malignant tumor in his neck and suddenly his whole life changed. As he went through treatment, which included chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone-marrow transplant, he kept journals of his thoughts, emotions, conversations, and musings, which became the basis for this memoir. There are some straightforward revelations about having cancer ("Because you hate the disease, you hate yourself for having it"), but Cody's observations for the most part are much more random and abstract, as when he states that "the series of chemo treatments" put him "right at the pyramidical, diamondsharp point of the Golden Ratio." His anecdotes have an ethereal quality that slides from mathematic equations, September 11, and his ancestor Buffalo Bill Cody to memories of snorting cocaine in the bathroom of a downtown New York City bar. Cody, of course, makes countless musical references, and his prose often takes on a rhythm of its own: "What a gorgeous mind she has, smooth as sanded sandalwood, and her skin like the petal of a white flower." Cody includes photocopies from his journal as well as excerpts from the diary his mother kept while caring for him and facsimiles from his deceased father's notebooks all of which cement this, at times, unconventional celebration of everything one man holds dear.