Carnovsky's Retreat
A Novel
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- €7.99
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- €7.99
Publisher Description
A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the usual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this way five thousand times.
This particular morning, however, he waves from the corner and is not seen again, nor is he heard from, for years. Decades later (at Oscar’s funeral) his daybooks come to light—a record of the missing years and of his life as The Invisible Mensch.
This unremarkable man will soon become an unforgettable character as you accompany him on his flight through the 1950s in a highly original second novel from Larry Duberstein, whose earlier work, The Marriage Hearse, was hailed by the critics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The heart of this charming novel is the ``walkaway'' diary of Oscar Carnovsky, owner of a Brooklyn beer warehouse and ace handicapper at the track, who waved good-bye to his wife one summer morning in 1955 and didn't show up again until the eve of her birthday two years later. Through his ebullient, down-to-earth journal, willed to his nephew after his death, Carnovsky describes his new life as 49-year-old ``bachelor'' Oscar Fishliving in one room in lower Manhattan, waiting tables at Belmont Park (and in the summer at Saratoga Springs) and falling in love, most notably with a 19-year-old Swarthmore coed who grooms horses at the Belmont stables. Duberstein, whose first novel, The Marriage Hearse, was praised for its refreshing voice, has again created a distinctive, appealing character. Oscar is a lovably crusty codger whose sweetness and honesty never verge on sentimentality, and whose story leaves the reader with unexpected insights.
