The Sleep of the Aborigines (The Driftless Trilogy)

Rating:
Summary: Great Comic, Brainy Noir
Review: If, like me, you've read the first two in Harsch's Driftless trilogy, then you'll definitely be glad to see that this final installment lives up to the earlier ones. It stands on its own, however, as a wry and unconventional crime novel layered with Harsch's utterly original, highly entertaining and brilliant musings. Harsch seems to me to be an American writer penning French books. (And the French do, apparently, love them.) Check out this author and let him shake the dust from your reading boots.

Rating:
Summary: REGISTERS OTHER WRITERS ARE UNABLE TO REACH OR ACKNOWLEDGE
Review: Rick Harsch's DRIFTLESS TRILOGY is a dark, rollicking, satirical dogfight in a corner of Wisconsin along the Mississippi, casting black humor and dazzling phosphorescent inflammatory prose as far as it goes. THE SLEEP OF THE ABORIGINES brings back Spleen, the original protagonist of the first volume of the trilogy (in the version of his twin brother, also called Spleen) but redoubles the metafictional pleasures and ironies inherent in his terrific characters: the peevish, anxious Spleen is watched over by the hovering presence of a dead writer, "Rick Harsh", first spotted in Chapter One floating face down in a swimming pool. Verbal fireworks, hallucinatory hijinks, and some of the most salient description in contemporary writing of the American existential landscape follows. Critics may be calling this 'post-modern fiction' but that's because Harsch has made the language new, and even the best of the rest, by definition, is now behind it.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous Book!
Review: Some of the editorial reviews have got it wrong with Harsch. Meanwhile, he's getting it right. Yes, his writing is playful and zany; it's also brilliant and unimitable. This whole trilogy is worth reading: Harsch is a true original. Very highly recommended.