Rating: Summary: Lyric Masterpiece Review: This catch-all social/political/sardonic/war/murder mystery/family story harkens back to what a literary novel should be - a novel of ideas, a fluid space where all life is meshed together. This novel reeks of place and atmosphere, resurrecing two periods in american history, the late seventies, and the cold war paranoia of the fifties. I can think of few writers who have evoked the tenor and fear of that time like Collins does in The Resurrectionists!Sold as a murder mystery, I bought this through a handsell from a local bookseller. However, perusing the first few pages, I knew this was more than suspense, the density of the writing, the lyric quality of the prose is just as arresting as the plot. There are times when the sheer brilliance of the language is overwhelming, when you have to just re-read sections. Isn't this what the literary novel is about, the last bastion of language, of ideas? In the last few years, there have been other literary pretenders, so called "All American Life Captured Here Books" but I don't think any are quite like this one.
Rating: Summary: Collins Goes Digging in The Dirt Review: Truth seems to be at the center of Collins' writing. Truth was in his award-winning novel, The Keepers of Truth, a brilliant twisted tale of murder and mystery in small-town America. When I provisionally read the blurb, I thought, is this previously charted terrain. It's a reason I kept from buying the book until I found it second hand. (Apologies to the author.) I could not have been further wrong, though The Resurrectionists concerns a murder, and its attenuated mystery, Collins has gone deeper, and created an intriguing and daring novel that charts the sub-conscious mind of a trouble man who witnessed, and was accused of setting the fire which killed his parents when he was five. The psychological trauma, and the narrator's subsequent care under psychiatrists who hypnotized him and his later episodes with shock treatment, create a fragmented and shifting reality, and as others have noted, Collins has deftly utilized the unreliable narrator technique like no other writer I've read. Collins' particular genius is wedding a story, idea and plot element to a literary technique, and here, Collins actually makes his reader experience the profound sense of loss and disorientation his narrator feels throughout the novel, as he moves close to solving the mystery at the heart of the novel - who is the mysterious murder suspect who now lies in a coma at the county hospital after having hung himself after killing the narrator's uncle at the beginning of the novel. That Collins balances a mystery with a socio-political and psychological deep novel is noteworthy. He has an ability to make apparently simple stuff complicated, for isn't all life complicated at its core. What is misconceiving is how we don't see the ambiguities in life. Collins makes them shimmer. He goes digging in the dirt of the subconscious. This was in my top two novels of 2002, second only by a hair's breath to, Middlesex.
Rating: Summary: Pacific Northwest Reading Group Review: We chose The Resurrectionists as it was selected as Novel of the Year by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA). Their selections have informed our reading group over the past few years. The Resurrectionists is such a radical departure from their previous selections. It seems that Collins has created a genre within a genre, coupling a gritty realism with an intellectual, satirical tone. The issue of the main character having the thoughts he has... i.e, is he too intelligent was a main focus initially of our conversation. There were those who dismissed the voice as too authorial. However, can we dismiss the intellectual rumination of a "loser." The fierce debate centered around the prejudice that some in the group seem to have for anybody from a lower socio-economic background. I had to argue that worker's unions and people of modest station have had very intellectual ideas, and that college is not the end all of creating sophisticated, intellectual minds. I think the history of literature has been created by auto-didatics as much as learned men and women. The prejudice that a loser could see and talk so candidly and exactly about his personal and the nation's plight worked for about half of us. This fault line did cause more conversation and more animosity between us than any previous novel. I think in retrospect, that is the core value and genius of this book. It's political invective, it's ability to move beyond the story to a charged political landscape. Without reservation, I'm assiging 5 stars to this novel, though I suspect others in the group will make their arguments against me. So be it. The book is that kind of book. I'm really glad that the Pacific Northwest Booksellers had the foresight and insight to see the latent political power that lies within this book. That said, it's also a great read, and its detractors, for the most part, were arguing that since the book worked so well plotwise and suspense wise, why add this other layer. Again, I had to argue, "This is what literature does... It moves beyond story to a larger context." Read it and decide for yourself!
Rating: Summary: Heart of Darkness and some Light Review: With roadside nightmares abounding in this book, "limbo spaces," Collins called them on his recent book tour, and with a main character who thinks of himself as God during one haunting scene, the analogy to recent horrors in Washington DC can be made. At least Collins tried to allign them during his reading. This novel is a chilling account of how close to the bone a man can come to becoming a psyhopath. Through the first third of the book, the sense of despair, violence and rage drips off the pages, but somehow it's not over-the-top, not given who Collins is writing about. The sense of disillusionment, paranoia and anger are there on the nightly news, and this book takes you to that heart of darkness. I didn't agree with everything Collins had to say about how we reach out and change such characters. Actually reading the book, I think Collins' overt politicization (he calls his books political) is tempered by a writing style that takes your breath away. The images are stark and searing, but reawaken our senses, let us see America again through a foreigner's eyes. The mystery also at the heart of the book moves with a great pace and it's not until the end that the mire of this character's live makes sense. The ending is one of hope, despite almost all of the book being dark. But the shift works. The Junior College scenes made me laugh out loud. I don't know if I would have bought this book if the writer hadn't been reading in the store, or taken the time to talk to me afterward, so maybe I'm bias, but I think this is one of the more unusual and unclassifable books you'll ever read. I don't know if I'd call it entertaining. Its effect needs some other qualifier...
Rating: Summary: Bone Chilling Social Realism Review: Wow. This is the darkest, most surreal novel you'll read in a long time. It had to be written by an outsider, i.e, an Irishman! Scary for its authenticity and vision of America...The ending, tying a Nixon quote to the metaphor for the book shows the intellectual verve and power of the writing. This is a social thriller, an amalgam of Steinbeck and Elmor Leonard. He says more in this novel that maybe any American writer I've read!
Rating: Summary: Nothing special Review: ~ Frank Cassidy learns in a newspaper of the death - possibly, murder - of his uncle, and goes back to North America to investigate any possibility of inheritance; to find out why his uncle died; and to sort out loose ends left in his head from a fire at his family farm in his childhood... This book starts off quite promisingly. The writer evidently knows the mechanics of how to write well. But the book lacks sufficient plot after about the first hundred pages (of a 360-page book) to keep the reader very interested in continuing with it. The journey to the end of the book becomes boring, too unstimulating, too slow, too drawn out, with too much description and detail just for the sake of giving description and detail, too much describing of humdrum life, with the reader wondering if the book is going to go anywhere sufficiently interesting to be worth going on turning the pages. The characters in the book aren't made particularly interesting in themselves. The story ceases to be interesting. The reader is left in the dark for too long as to where the book is heading to, or why all the details are supposed to be interesting, or what the point of the book is supposed to be. Whilst what really happened many years before, in Frank's childhood, is revealed to us in the last fifteen pages of the book, by the time the reader gets there, he will probably have lost interest in the tale anyway. A few specifics in the plot that didn't really seem to fit together well: 1. It seemed odd for Frank just to dump Juniper, the family pet, in someone else's car, and for that action then just to be accepted by the rest of the family. 2. It seemed odd for Frank to go back home with specific personal missions in his mind, but yet then never actually to get round to meeting up with Norman and Martha face to face for the whole time he was up there. 3. It seemed odd for Norman and Martha just to run away without saying more to anyone, after their herd was slaughtered. 4. Why Chester Green was suddenly being referred to as 'the Sleeper' didn't seem to be explained. 5. It seemed odd for Frank, not rich, not to want to salvage any possessions from either house before they were bulldozed. 6. It seemed odd and too convenient for Frank suddenly to be interrogating Baxter, his new co-worker, for information, which was forthcoming, as soon as he met him. 7. It seemed odd for Frank just to be allowed to be left alone with Chester Green in a hospital unsupervised, particularly in later visits after he had already been suspected of trying to harm or interfere with Chester Green earlier on. 8. Why Baxter suddenly ended up in the sanatorium following the window-smashing incident and ended up getting ECT treatment wasn't very clear. 9. Frank suddenly realising his mother had died in a fall many years ago, by listening to tapes, didn't really ring very true. 10. The detail at the end of the book (page 357), of Frank killing the paralysed 'Chester Green' in the sanatorium, seemed to be a detail borrowed straight out of 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest', where the huge red indian suffocates the comitose Jack Nicholson at the end of that film. That conclusion seems to be borne out by a reference to 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' in this book, just a page later (page 358). All in all, this was not a very satisfying book, for a variety of reasons - mainly lack of interesting plot and lack of interesting characters.
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