Review Summaries

• The novel's bold structure and dense web of references are often praised as exhilarating play, while some readers find its length and digressive energy demanding.

Reviews

• Rodrigo Fresan is one of those twenty first century Latin American superstars that you definitely need to check out. He is one of the true masters of 'metafiction' in this new century that are worth mentioning. This is the second book from him that I have finished so far after Kensington Gardens. In this, as in his previous book, he challenges the concept of modern fiction by concocting a new blend that seamlessly intertwines long digressive episodes of highly illuminative & speculative prose with elements of a literary biography and 60's and 70's pop culture and counterculture, as well as his particular penchant for his muse, the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and the 70's British psychedelic rock group, Pink Floyd. The dazzling highlights of this book comes only after lengthy digressions of around 300 pages or so, and it comprises a rather elaborate chapter in the second part of the story that describes the last days of the life of Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, during the writing process of his last work of fiction titled Tender is the Night, and his numerous associations during his time at the French riviera, most notably, the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the aristocratic couple, Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara. This section with its dizzylingly intricate structural pyrotechnics is, for me, some of the best sections of prose I have recently read. This amazing section is followed by another where the author displays his penchant for 60's and 70's pop culture, and particularly the history of the progressive rock movement that reigned supreme during that period, and the section is replete with more than generous mention of all those prog rock groups including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd (and especially their mid 70's opus Wish You Were Here), Van der Graaf Generator. He likes to say that Pink Floyd were the only great band that produced timeless music and all the others were just fancy upstarts. This is one thing that is particularly contentious and is one which I am wont to disagree completely with the author. This is what he writes about them: '...technical sophistication with a casual elegance approximated only- just a little, not much- by Genesis, already sans the histrionic Peter Gabriel......Luckily for him (Yes and their covers anticipating the Avatar silliness and Jon Anderson's little voice were never a problem; Mike Oldfield was a species of Pink Floyd crossed with Liberace; King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator were too hermetic and virtuosic; and the truth is that Ian Anderson and his flute and his shepherd stork poses make you feel a little embarrassed for him.......all those diversions, products of adolescent hormonal curiosity, didn't last long. And Tom returned to his same desert oasis as always. Pink Floyd was unique, they began and ended in Pink Floyd. Their music- their harmonic climates and sonic sequences- remained classically modern and modernly classic' So Mr. Fresan thinks that Pink Floyd was the only timeless band. Wrong. I am a devotee of 70's prog rock and I think Yes and King Crimson were the most instrumental and sophisticated bands during that period, and I must say that Steve Howe was the greatest guitarist of that era and Steve Hackett was as good a guitarist as David Gilmore, if not better. That said, I must once again contend that the random and lengthy digressive episodes do not stop here. Indeed, even reading this from the perspective of a devotee of modern metafiction, this book reads rather strange and unusual. Rodrigo Fresan has created here something that I would like to call a metafiction 'hybrid'- and particularly one that hangs rather loosely on the sleeves. Call it 'speculative' fiction. Or even 'digressive' fiction. Or even non-fiction. The writer concentrates the last section exclusively on the role of books or fiction in this modern 'multitasking' era. And even the role of writers in general in this modern age. Here's what he has to say: '...Personally, I don't worry about the future of the literary book. There will always be a happy resistance reading Proust and Joyce and, probably, courtesy of gratuitous pirating or sold authors' rights, there might even be more people trying, at least for a few pages, to read Proust and Joyce. There's no crisis there; in what we call literature. Literature will find a way to survive; and a few days ago I read a book where it was suggested that literature's salvation would come from wealthy melancholics who would take exclusive control of their favorite authors' novels, to be read by them alone, in exchange for sizable sums....'

• GREAT

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