The Nostalgia Echo
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Nostalgia is coming back around. A professional narrator named Gene is searching for his birth mother, armed with nothing but a Polaroid photograph of her at a 1976 book release party for Dr. Everett Barnes’ Nostalgia: Its Origins and Attributes. Dr. Barnes, meanwhile, is about to become famous for a book he wrote thirty years ago.
Nostalgia – once considered a potentially-fatal disease when it was first diagnosed in the 17th century – has been relegated to the realm of the sentimental, but based on Dr. Barnes’ theories, people are beginning to reconsider its dangerous effects: doctors return to the old cures; pharmaceutical companies solicit Dr. Barnes to endorse the new anti-nostalgic medications they have developed; and Gene seeks out Dr. Barnes to somehow realign the missing pieces of his past into a story with a beginning, middle, and ending. With wit and humor, The Nostalgia Echo presents a revealing look at the problem of progress--that moving forward often means leaving something behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man sets out to find his birth mother, armed only with a Polaroid linking her to prominent "nostalgia theorist" Dr. Everett Barnes, in this jumbled satire from Hess (Is Hip Hop Dead?). Gene, a professional voiceover artist in a not-too-distant-future, where all TV is a kind of staged reality show, learns that he was adopted when he stumbles across Princeton professor Barnes's 1976 book The Good Old Days Never Happened. His adoptive parents confess that they know nothing about his birth mother beyond a photograph of her attending one of Barnes's readings. Nostalgia once considered a physical ailment before being relegated to wistful remembrances is making a resurgence, as is Barnes's popularity. Now pharmaceutical companies hope to exploit nostalgia with Barnes's endorsement. Gene's quest gets lost in the shuffle of Barnes's shift into the spotlight and the public's fascination with preserving or destroying the collective past. Also woven in are the struggles of semiretired graffiti artist Lon Friday and his recent separation from his archivist wife. Brief flashes of Vonnegutian absurdity and allusions to Holden Caulfield's belief in the futility of storytelling aren't enough to bring cohesion to this intriguing but poorly executed idea.
