Golden Delicious
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
"What a crazed, beautiful book ... Boucher makes the world come alive by making language come alive." — George Saunders
From the writer Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven) called "Strange and dazzling" comes a funny, heartbreaking, and wildly imaginative tale
Welcome to Appleseed, Massachusetts, where stories grow in soil, sentences are kept as pets, and pianos change your point of view. Golden Delicious chronicles the narrator's rich, vivid childhood - driving to the local flea market with his father, causing trouble at school, pedaling through the neighborhood on his Bicycle Built for Two.
But as the local economy sours, the narrator's family is torn apart. His mother joins a flying militia known as The Mothers; his father takes an all-consuming job; his sister runs away for a better life elsewhere. Who will save Appleseed? Will it be the Memory of Johnny Appleseed? The Mothers? The narrator himself?
Golden Delicious is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Christopher Boucher's acclaimed debut, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. It's a tour-de-force unlike any other, that takes you to the heart of family, love and memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Today's readers are old hands at meta stories that branch into other stories, stories that acknowledge the reader but this one ups the ante. Boucher (How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive) suggests that a place can be a text. That place is the town of Appleseed, Mass., and it's a world at risk. Things go bad for Appleseed when bookworms with "print-based" bodies that let them change into endless characters or ideas infest the town, ruining the apple crop. Main character ____, a melancholy kid, pals around with his pet sentence, "I am," and someone named Reader. Given the general weirdness traffic cones run the town, for instance actual readers can be forgiven for not realizing right away that Reader is, in fact, a reader, and specifically the reader of this book. When Appleseed spirals into a downturn and ____'s mother takes off to join the Mothers, who patrol Appleseed's perimeter looking for wayward words, the importance of readers/Reader becomes clear. Boucher literalizes the familiar (money is meaning, as in ideas and metaphor), and estranges readers from an act they do all time and are actually doing in that very moment reading. It's an odd, clever, and thoroughly enjoyable experience.
