Glimpses

Rating:
Summary: It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it...
Review: A well-written character-oriented sci-fi, rock & roll novel This is a great read for science fiction fans and rock and roll fans alike. A compelling story of a man's search for meaning in his life (and sorting out his relationship with his late father) set against a background of "Twilight Zone-ish" in nature. This is a highly enjoyable novel. If you're a music fan, don't let the sci-fi tag steer you away from this, and vice versa. I've read this twice, and plan to read it again!

Rating:
Summary: An Instant Classic -- Creative, Moving, and Unique
Review: All right, I know it's strange to start speaking about a book, which touches upon the Doors, Beach Boys and Hendrix with a quote from a Disney song, but it IS an appropriate one.
Because this book is not only about music, but also about how we react to it, and how our life changes (maybe) because of music.
I'm too young to remember the 60s (being born in 1976), but this novel really fleshed out that era and its people for me. I think that for those, who really was there it will be even better.
Glimpses is not fantasy in ebveryday sence. I'd say it's magical realism, not unlike Jonathan Carrol or Haruki Murakami.
And the thing that makes it really great, is that it can convey to you the feeling of listening to the best music that never was, and I can't think of many authors who can wright about music so vividly. That's a tremendous achivement.
In short: this book lets you glimpse another world. And it as real as this one. I don't know how Mr. Shiner does it. It's a kind of magic

Rating:
Summary: Can't get it out of my head...
Review: I can't turn it off, turn it down, wash it off, or get it out of my head. This book has really gotten to me.

Did you ever notice how full of feeling some Beach Boys songs are? How "Good Vibrations" is a jolt of pure happiness and hope, a ray of sonic sunshine? This is a book for people who've noticed things like that. But "Glimpses" is much more than a love letter to great music or a document of the late sixties --it's a shamanic journey into human powers of healing, repair, and redemption through spiritual and emotional connection.

The book is actually set in the late eighties: Tienanmen Square, Lockerbie, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Milli Vanilli, Richard Marx, Martika... The ordinary-guy protagonist, stereo repairman Ray Shackleford, becomes able, through music, to enter altered states of consciousness and being--he closes his eyes, sinks into the music, and he's twenty years in the past, with the Beatles, with Jim Morrison, with Brian Wilson.

IMO, here's where the author turns what could have been a straightforward novel of time-travel into a shamanic journey of raw spiritual power--because it's NOT the past Ray is visiting, as his actions there never affect the present. I'd argue that he's entering the collective unconscious of our species--a sort of matrix of memory and desire. While in this realm of the unconscious, Ray Shackleford, music lover and accidental shaman, meets the musical gods of the late Sixties, on a mission to save their great works lost to mental illness or death. Instead of just repairing stereos, he tries to repair the past: the lost life, the lost futures, and the lost music.

Amazingly, the human drama of Ray's everyday life is even more compelling than his nonordinary travels. His personal journey is of equal importance to his musical journey, and mirrors the healing he undertakes in reshaping the past--dealing with the destructive emotional legacy of his dead father, and exploring, forming, and reforming his attachments to friends, lovers, and family. This isn't just a book about fantasy encounters with musical icons, about a music-lover's "rescue" of the great lost albums of the sixties. Primarily, it's a story of yearning and redemption in one human life. Read this book if you love the Beatles or the Yardbirds or Hendrix or the Beach Boys (especially the Beach Boys) or the Doors or Dylan or Janis or Love or Van Morrison or any of the great musical pioneers of that era, or any of the great musical pioneers of any era, anywhere. Read it if you are drawn to the unstable edges of human experience where reality and desire intersect, making beauty and pain and healing and fear and love and music. "Glimpses" is like nothing I've ever read before--simple, beautiful, powerful, moving, important, unpretentious, full of hope and life, yet unafraid of the terrible costs of growth and love and change. Almost nothing in the book is less than earned, or real, or right. This book is holy in its way, to me, a woman who loves music, a woman who has her own happy endings to hope for, her own journeys of redemption and growth to take.

This book deserves to stay in print forever. Like all beautiful things that do good in the world, it should never be lost.

Rating:
Summary: An Instant Classic -- Creative, Moving, and Unique
Review: I was a little skeptical regarding this book when I first heard of it -- thinking how poorly executed the concept of traveling back in time and finishing "lost" rock classics could be in the hands of a hack or lousy writer. Instead, I find myself completely surprised and amazed that Shiner has pulled it off! He really brings alive LA in the 1960s, and makes you really feel that you are right there with Brian Wilson as he finally finishes "Smile" or hanging out on Sunset Strip with Jim Morrison on a drunken, wild bender....

This is a highly imaginative and creative book, taking a great concept and just executing it beautifully. On top of that, Shiner has weaved in a very moving story of personal redemption, a marriage on the rocks, and a sense that the ideals of the 60s have been lost or diluted through time, attrition, and missed opportunities.

If you have an interest in this subject matter, you will enjoy this book and turn every page with interest, waiting for the next flight of fancy of the very creative mind of Lewis Shiner.

Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: Jill likes this folk song that is quite appropriate for our generation. The song, written and sung by a Gen Xer, tells about how all the Baby Boomers tell her that "it must be sad to have been born a little late." Being born late, the Gen Xer missed out on so much: the Summer of Love, Peace Marches, etc. The Gen Xer thinks this is a load of crap and wishes the Baby Boomers would just get over it (and grow up, for chrissakes). I've expressed a similar sentiment before in these pages, but directed at the generation before the Boomers and their fixation on the crash of the American Pie and the loss of Valens et al. So when I say that I found this Boomer book--about how the music and culture of their collective childhood was so great--fabulous, you know that it faced a tough audience.

Glimpses does not hide the fact that it is about the 60s and rock music (given the demographics of the population, probably wise--there are a lot more reminiscing Boomers than fed-up Xers), and I likely took my time turning to it because it wore its influences on its jacket. I bought the book when it came out because I knew Lew Shiner from Austin and had all his other books. Lew's previous novels are kind of a mixed bag. His first, Frontera, was published by Baen, not your usual source for quality literature, and while enjoyable enough at the time, I'm not sure that Frontera has weathered quite as well as its cyberpunk contemporaries. In his second novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Lew's style and subject matter improved tremendously. In my internal cataloging schema, I tend to group Deserted Cities of the Heart with Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After and Karen Joy Fowler's Artificial Things. See the paradigm shift: from Cyberpunk to feminism in one novel. Deserted Cities of the Heart was still genre, however, and Lew totally dispensed with that in his third novel, Slam. It's not quite correct, but the voice in my head associates Slam with the line in Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" that goes "what's it like being a skate-boarding punk rocker." The writer's progress in the three novels is readily apparent, and I liked each succeeding book much more than its predecessors. But there was still that jacket painting of Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix prompting the irrational knee-jerk response.

Several things finally broke through my resistance, including Glimpses winning the World Fantasy Award, unsolicited comments and recommendations for the book from several First Impressions and Rondua members, and then it appeared in the middle of all the Anthony Powell that Alexandria Digital Literature recommends that I read. A long plane trip to New Jersey was the final straw.

I started reading it hesitantly, then slowly relaxed and started enjoying it rather than dreading it. By the time I got to page 50 I had to close the book and let the wave of "good vibrations" flow over me before continuing. It did not matter that I had waited three years before reading this--everything was alright in the world because I was only a sixth of the way into a book that I knew was my type of novel and I did not have to worry about stopping reading for at least 2,000 miles.

Glimpses is about the late 60s, but it is much more about the late 80s and one man's relation to both decades, his father and his wife. Ray Shackleford repairs stereos in Austin, his father has just died, and he is starting to realize that his marriage is falling apart and that he is an alcoholic. Escaping from it all, he sits in his repair shop imagining what things would be like if things had been different. If he could have understood his father. If the Beatles had not broken up. If that aborted session that would have been their last studio album had actually come about. And then there it is, coming from his radio: "The Long and Winding Road." But not the over-produced, orchestrated version that we are familiar with, but a more basic version. Something that was not supposed to exist.

It is a fantasy novel, no doubt about that, but the ready acceptance of the fantastic by the characters means Glimpses is more kin to Borges or Carroll (i.e., magic realism) than Feist or Eddings. While the fantastic elements are fun and Shiner does a superb job of re-creating the atmospheres of the recording sessions, it is Ray, his friendships and his family relationships that drive you to keep reading. Before you are halfway through this novel, you want happiness for Ray, but know that there will be a lot of pain and suffering before he will achieve peace. And you know that his power to re-create music that never was will be as much a danger to him as a gift.

Glimpses has my highest recommendation, and given a sufficient waiting period, will likely be on my list of Top 10 favorite novels.

Rating:
Summary: Best rock & roll novel EVER!
Review: Lewis Shiner is BRILLIANT. If U're a music fan, U'll love GLIMPSES. Shiner balances his narrator's personal life & problems (dead father, crumbling marriage, lost feeling, new love in his life) with the music that gives meaning 2 it all 4 him. Perhaps most impressive R the glimpses of famous rock & roll stars -- The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix -- Shiner gets U up close 2 all these greats, & HE DOESN'T BLOW THE IMPORTANT DETAILS. U'll feel like U've MET these people, & every moment of Bing close 2 them rings true. U'll B there when their music is created, C where it comes from, & know what it means -- 2 all music fans. Hallucinatory, vivid, brilliant -- would make a heckuva movie. Shiner's got the music in him. U will LOVE this book. Clearly, the greatest rock and roll novel EVER.

Rating:
Summary: Troubled man lives out rock music fantasies.
Review: Ray, an electronics repairman, is having trouble with hisrelationships. He can't articulate his love to the womanin his life, and he can't reconcile his feelings for his father. In a marvelously-rendered fantasy, Ray manages his frustration and despair by escaping into some of the most legendary scenarios in the history of rock and roll. Through his intervention in the lives of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and (especially) Brian Wilson, Ray learns to come to terms with the emotional challenges in his own relationships. Shiner has crafted an imaginative, thoughtful, and moving story of redemption and reconciliation, told against a backdrop of some magical moments in rock history.

Rating:
Summary: A well-written character-oriented sci-fi, rock & roll novel
Review: This is a great read for science fiction fans and rock and roll fans alike. A compelling story of a man's search for meaning in his life (and sorting out his realtionship with his late father) set against a background of journeying back through time to meet with rock icons like Hnedrix and Morrison, who represent various parts of Ray's (the main character's) psyche.Shiner's knowledge of rock history is excellent and the plot device used to send our hero back in time is less techno-oriented and more "Twilight Zone-ish" in nautre. This is a highly enjoyable novel. If you're a music fan, don't let the sci-fi tag steer you away from this, and vice versa.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat disappointing
Review: This was not a bad book by any means, but I found the author got sidetracked too much into the protagonist's personal relationships with father, wife, mother, "the other woman". It was supposed to be about the music but that ended up being secondary to everything else. It all came together a little too neatly in the end, too. Again, it's not bad, but if you are picking it up because you want to read about music be aware that you are also going to have to sit through this guy's attempt to write his way out of some private angst.