Abracadabrantesque John M Keller 9780692303047 Books
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John M. Keller’s mind-spinning, continent-spanning new novel takes off from a term coined by the word-intoxicated poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Its intimations of flying-carpet magic and pierrot lunaire adventure are fully realized in this tale of Americans at large in South American, European and African landscapes. Marcus, our narrator, is a former-athlete-turned-gypsy who finds his way, along with his scandal-raising sister, Connie, to the unlikely refuge of Montevideo. When their quixotic journalist pal, Felip, gets into deep waters in his heedless investigative crusading, Marcus is flushed from his Uruguayan hideaway and exposed to the perils of global intrigue.
Abracadabrantesque John M Keller 9780692303047 Books
This was received in exchange for an honest reviewKeller comes back with another novel with an even more odder title than his last novel. Even the synopsis that was provided on Goodreads seems to be rather ambiguous and practically nonsensical. I went in knowing his little trademarks, thick prose stuffed with photographic descriptions and philosophical aphorisms. This is also his longest novel, double the size of his other novels, from what I’ve read so far.
Unlike his last novel, which was a futuristic dystopian that brought back memories of reading Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, this novel stuck to your traditional slice-of-life style. But somehow it was surreal and sprawled across all around the globe and through time.
The whole plot is about a family that falls apart after their oldest son comes out as gay and his siblings move and go on their own way in various countries. The oldest is in Italy, the youngest boy, the main narrator, ends up in the Mid West or somewhere in the U.S. And the sister is off somewhere on her own creating her own life divergent from her own.
Eventually they all go on this sort of diaspora where they travel around the world, discover themselves, and others that share lifestyles in common with. The narrator is always finding love and then it breaks off from him or he does it himself. Friends and lovers leave and come back and change, but it is hard for them to forget each other. And as time goes by, the one who never seems to stay in one place is the main narrator, the lover boy that is constantly morphing and molding around what is left and what he still actually cares about.
Of course, I am immediately reminded of The Savage Detectives Where there is a sort of an odyssey where two poets travel to various countries and endure some trifles to meet one elusive poetess. And then there are various characters that have their story told and are somehow connected with one of these poets. What is similar is that both characters in these two novels are sort of disillusioned, dissatisfied, lost, and yet somehow they still feel hungry for more, despite constant failures.
Despite that there was no magic or futuristic technology in this novel, it is still somehow surreal. There are definitely some absurdist moments, in a sense that these things that happen in here are least likely to happen in real life. The narrator also seems to attract people of all walks as if he were the most charismatic chick and dude magnet in the world.
I will admit that I didn’t really like this novel as much as his last one. I get that it was meant to be this way, exhausting and yet turbulent. It flows a lot like reality itself, constantly changing its tune and painting a new background, but yet somehow everything still seems the same and seems to repeat with the most minimal of disparity.
Rating: 3/5
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Abracadabrantesque John M Keller 9780692303047 Books Reviews
Oh no. If you’re going to read this, and I genuinely recommend you do, be warned prepare for the itinerant within to wake the hell up because Abra will provoke all that damn pent up wanderlust.
This amazing feat by John Keller, will take you on a trip around the world you would never be able to plan for yourself. And, in true Keller style, you won’t be skimming off the surface from one corner of the globe to the next... rather you’re going to get to know some of these places pretty intimately. Seriously, I don’t think I’m going to need a map when I get to Montevideo (and I am going to get there).
But, wait. There’s more. Abra is one of those books that will take you in, whole. You will be invested, you will care. You will want to, at gut wrenching moments, go back a few pages with the (totally futile) hope that, maybe, if you read it again, it won’t happen. Or… if it absolutely has to happen, you’ll be better prepared for it. But, no – it doesn’t work like that.
This is because, as you read, you will recognize that at some point in your life, you have known them. Each of them. You’ve known Marcus – you’ve cared for him; you’ve known Felip and also Caroline, definitely Francesca. Best of all, you’ve been lucky to have known Connie. Maybe you even were Connie at one point. Maybe you still are? The point is, you cannot not get involved when each of these characters come together unexpectedly to a paint a surreal Picasso-esque portrait of either yourself or the people in your life you’ve loved, possibly lost. To each his/her own – but to me, this is the magic of this book.
All I can say is pace yourself. Take your time with this one… its fantastic.
They're out there, those world-spanning, time-traveling novels of globalization. World epics, whatever. I was coming hard off two particular disappointments, The Orphan-Master's Son and The Flamethrowers. Cartoons. Never mind, that was time I spent willingly. So I returned to something new by way of an old favorite. Keller's gotten his feet wet repeatedly, first hot out of some Texas borderland hell, this side of paradise, the Bridge of the Americas, then every conceivable corner of the compass. His new world is only the lens of some subterranean lines that circle the present in red, the title a sigil, New York as one door to the labyrinth. Conjure man. His earlier books were eye-opening, to put it mildly. Fissures and conundrums, but always there's the voice. His, Keller's, and yet not, because this is fiction and characters speaking. Not convincingly, by which we usually mean something's being sold on the cheap, but tellingly. What greater extension of this than Marcus, one-time pro kicker (New Orleans Saints), booting pigskin through a gate to hades. After that saison d'enfer he settles in for the real chance, burrowing into language, books, far places, wherever his toss of the dice, which doesn't at all abolish chance, takes him. This is a Bildungsroman turned not inside out, a simple reversal, but into the spindly distances of a thriller. "What DID I expect?" the protagonist asks. "I had NO expectations... from life. Isn't that what made me unique, singular Marc-oose? A lack of a sense of the future? No hopes? No dreams? I was the perfect guy to rope into a mission halfway across the world to reclaim a hostage. After breakfast, I had nothing planned for the day. I might have otherwise spent the afternoon reading books (no longer the classics or the award-winners, but the most reclusive and ascetic of books, the sort that held just inside their jackets a leftover library sleeve from the 60s that showed that the book had been taken out only once and by a girl named Margaret) or wandering the streets of Uruguay, forever lulled by its charm, how it, and not the lost underground tunnels and cities of the Garamantes, was the ultimate dinosaur skeleton, lying FULLY intact--even still breathing (buried alive)--yet forever skipped over by the paleontologists and anthropologists, walked over, as if it really were just under one large bridge from Brazil to Argentina, while deep below the surface it existed as a sophisticated world culture that, too, saw itself as only a shadow?" Good question, my man. You get the texture straight-up Antonioni dropkicking Borges through the goal posts, into some alternate end zone. The world emerges, it doesn't come down readymade anymore than you do. Instead we get the rough constructions Keller explored in his earlier novels, Know Your Baker and The Box and the Briefcase...., and shot through the stories of A Bald Man With No Hair (with these titles alone you start to get the picture). After those disappointments I mentioned earlier I wanted to gulp this one down, starving for traces of the Underworlds and Otherworlds this guy's got the number of. Marcus, yes, and Keller. Every sentence glitters, and this is the heart of this telling, the cold flow of sentences, the heat of what being they bring. The man rambles, make no mistake, and that's a journey any adventurer in language is willing to take, because, well, chances are few. Abracadabrantesque cuts a line through the circular world, catches the rhythms and beats of a world music no Lonely Planet checklist will ever capture. We can reckon on a future history in which this red star will shine bright on the things we remembered once knowing, not knowing, like our nostalgia for what's to come. You get it. I did, and I'm ready to do it again.
This was received in exchange for an honest review
Keller comes back with another novel with an even more odder title than his last novel. Even the synopsis that was provided on Goodreads seems to be rather ambiguous and practically nonsensical. I went in knowing his little trademarks, thick prose stuffed with photographic descriptions and philosophical aphorisms. This is also his longest novel, double the size of his other novels, from what I’ve read so far.
Unlike his last novel, which was a futuristic dystopian that brought back memories of reading Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, this novel stuck to your traditional slice-of-life style. But somehow it was surreal and sprawled across all around the globe and through time.
The whole plot is about a family that falls apart after their oldest son comes out as gay and his siblings move and go on their own way in various countries. The oldest is in Italy, the youngest boy, the main narrator, ends up in the Mid West or somewhere in the U.S. And the sister is off somewhere on her own creating her own life divergent from her own.
Eventually they all go on this sort of diaspora where they travel around the world, discover themselves, and others that share lifestyles in common with. The narrator is always finding love and then it breaks off from him or he does it himself. Friends and lovers leave and come back and change, but it is hard for them to forget each other. And as time goes by, the one who never seems to stay in one place is the main narrator, the lover boy that is constantly morphing and molding around what is left and what he still actually cares about.
Of course, I am immediately reminded of The Savage Detectives Where there is a sort of an odyssey where two poets travel to various countries and endure some trifles to meet one elusive poetess. And then there are various characters that have their story told and are somehow connected with one of these poets. What is similar is that both characters in these two novels are sort of disillusioned, dissatisfied, lost, and yet somehow they still feel hungry for more, despite constant failures.
Despite that there was no magic or futuristic technology in this novel, it is still somehow surreal. There are definitely some absurdist moments, in a sense that these things that happen in here are least likely to happen in real life. The narrator also seems to attract people of all walks as if he were the most charismatic chick and dude magnet in the world.
I will admit that I didn’t really like this novel as much as his last one. I get that it was meant to be this way, exhausting and yet turbulent. It flows a lot like reality itself, constantly changing its tune and painting a new background, but yet somehow everything still seems the same and seems to repeat with the most minimal of disparity.
Rating 3/5
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