This Magnificent Desolation
A Novel
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Descripción editorial
Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose.
Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him. Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky cut with sharp regret. She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and his wounds run deep too.
Thrown into this mysterious adult world, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio, from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home, and dreams of finding his real father.
A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation allows a child's perspective to illuminate a dark world, and explores the creeping devastation of war, the many facets of loneliness, the redemptive power of the imagination, and the possibility of a kind of grace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raised in a Catholic orphanage in Minnesota's Iron Range, Duncan, the youthful hero of O'Malley's unrelentingly grim second novel (after In the Province of Saints), grows up listening to the story of how his mother left him there during the storm of the century in 1970. Eleven years later, Duncan's mother, once-promising opera singer Maggie Bright, returns to take him back to San Francisco, where she works as an oncology terminal ward nurse, moonlights as a saloon singer, and drinks too much. In his new home, Duncan, who finds a kind of surrogate father in his mother's friend Joshua McGreevey (a Vietnam veteran employed 70 feet under the city digging the San Padre Tunnel), is obsessed with the Apollo space program, especially Apollo 11, whose astronauts he believes never returned from the moon. Over the next four years, Duncan deals with suicide, sickness, violence, and catastrophic accidents while navigating between an unknown past and an uncertain future. Some readers might feel that this novel's emotional landscape, populated by characters haunted by their personal histories, fulfills astronaut Buzz Aldrin's famous description of the moon as "a magnificent desolation," while others may find the endless litany of despair hollow and forced.