enrike

And I can't get it out of my head... This book is a ballad, a haunting ballad that continues to play its plaintive notes in my head, like a refrain. Don't be fooled by the product description (of a man in love with his ipod). This is not a jaunty, trendy escape tale. This is for serious readers who love literature, and who love literature to descant. Julian Donahue is middle-aged, affluent, and adrift. After his son's death, his marriage unravels, but he remains tightly wound. He has a successful career producing commercials, yet he is increasingly filled with self-loathing and dread. He spends dissolute nights seducing beautiful, indifferent women or drearily bantering with his eccentric, cunning brother. The consummate and lugubrious loner, Julian is unable to pursue happiness. His ipod shuffle is his only source of bliss; each song is a monument to a moment in time, a memory stilled or distilled, a dream of an image of a life. Julian's opaque existence is thrown into sharp relief through the prism of his songs. As his father before him, only music and his past can pierce his diamond-hard heart. And then one night Julian walks into a bar and is struck by the young Irish rock singer on-stage, Cait O'Dwyer. A rising star, a supernova, a red-haired songbird, Cait commands his attention with her saucy but vulnerable charisma and nubile essence. After the show, he buys her CD, returns home and googles her, downloads her music into his ipod--and so begins their love affair. But this is an unprecedented romance. They decide not to meet right away; rather, they circle one other. They spend time together alone. They shadow each other. He illustrates her on cork nightclub coasters--images of her vibrant potential--each with a title--and leaves them for her at the bar. One is entitled "Bleaker and Oblique." She responds, writes an eponymous song and leaves him clues and a key under her mat. Yet they tacitly understand that it isn't the right time to meet. Julian captures her on film from a distance, enters her home when she isn't there. They email, occasionally talk on the phone, and correspond, paradoxically, in ways even more intimate than can be imagined in person. Their relationship is a sensuous aria and they are each others' accompaniment. As the story crescendos toward its fascinating denouement, I actually broke out in a sweat. This is an emotional, psychological, and romantic thriller that creates a bubble of tension so taut that it will leave you breathless and drenched. During the last 60 pages, I was heaving. This novel was an emotionally athletic experience that exhilarated and moved me into strange and intoxicating places. I have read two earlier novels by Phillips--The Egyptologist and Prague, which I thoroughly enjoyed. However, this novel is distinctly different in narrative style. What a virtuoso--I didn't recognize him in this book by his erstwhile prose or any previous patterns. I was stunned by his ability to engulf me with this story. Although his prose is cerebral, it is also poetic. You could lift almost any sentence from this novel, place it on a clean, white sheet, and contemplate it, ponder it, reflect on its individual acuity. And yet, inclusively, the sentences connect beautifully into a quiet explosion, a bonfire of a book. Like a poet, he can be simultaneously precise and circumspect--a razor and a rhyme, canny and uncanny, at once and out of time. Read it the first time for the hot chill, and then read it again for the quiet thrill. "Breakdown on the shoreline, Can't move, it's an ebbtide. Morning don't get here till night, Searching for her silver light." ---Electric Light Orchestra

2022-10-29 03:25