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[sic]
A Memoir
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
“The memoir of the year . . . a book in which the sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes.”—New York Times
Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Facing a bone marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter with beautiful Ariel, who gives him cocaine and a blow job in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; the detailed morphine fantasy complete with a bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed.
Moving effortlessly between references to Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and studded with pages from his own diaries and hospital notebooks, [sic] is a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man’s battle against disease and 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.
