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Title: The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer ISBN: 0-312-30605-9 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: What a find
Comment: I picked this book up because I live in Bay Area and I was interested in reading a Bay Area author. This book is truly a find. The characters are fully realized and the writing is quite beautiful. I have to admit, I did find the first section (the first reunion of the comet) to be a little hard to get into, but I plowed forward, and now I am entirely wrapped up in the narrative. There are lines in this that sparkle--the kind you write down to remember long after you have put down the book. Further, the way time works in this novel is quite astonishing--you believe you're on this linear path where you're marching through the years. However, the narrative keeps circling around these moments. While on some levels this isn't Virginia Woolf (and I am also reading MRS DALLOWAY at the same time), I do find that both Greer and Woolf are interested in the "moment" and the ways in which a moment can resonate but not actually change a life--these moments are not Joycian epiphanies that become public acknowledgments of change. Instead these are touchstones in our lives that we return to again and again and ponder. A great book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Five Stars and Two Comets
Comment: This novel is a remarkable find. Beautifully written, with many highly individualized characters, described with sharp and subtle insight. They interact through a cyclical plot that documents the effects of time on ambition (declining)and compassion (increasing). Never predictable, it is always intelligent and profoundly sympathetic to the human condition. The story moves with Comet Swift, from its discovery through two orbits (24 years),with periodic reunions at aphelion and perihelion. The second comet is discovered along the way by the protagonists, the reluctant lovers whose sad and joyous affair is the backbone of the narrative. One of the best I've read in recent years.
Rating: 5
Summary: Reader's Delight
Comment: "The Path of Minor Planets" is a reader's delight. Complex. Character-driven. Agile. Beautiful. It's a magnificent, mature work, amazing for a first novelist.
Written in what critics now like to call "psycho-narrative," Greer's book displays a third-person omniscient narrative that bores into its characters heads. It's a risky style: after all, Greer has to populate his characters with enough detail and freshness so that they feel real. And that he does it, not through action or scene or dialog, but for the most part through the subtler, richer stuff of the human brain and its wandering eye. Like "The Waves," "Path..." brings us about as close to our essential humanity as a book can.
"Path..." ostensibly is about a group of astronomers who meet once every six years to celebrate a minor comet discovered by their own academic star, Professor Swift. Their first meeting to witness the comet's passing from a lightless and distant Pacific isle is interrupted by an accident involving the death of a child. Subsequent chapters track characters who were present at the scene through their lives, failed marriages, and stormy careers.
But "Path..." reveals much more. "Path..." shows us the effect of inhabiting different heads, of the space separating human objects in their orbits around one another, of the physical and emotional laws tying us together.
It's unfortunate that Greer's book has thus far been under-appreciated. However, with the talent available to the author, I have no doubt as to his future successes.
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Title: The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer ISBN: 0374128715 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 01 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: How It Was for Me : Stories by Andrew Sean Greer ISBN: 0312241267 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 07 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Eyre Affair: A Novel by Jasper Fforde ISBN: 0142001805 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde ISBN: 0670031909 Publisher: Penguin USA Pub. Date: 31 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Old School by TOBIAS WOLFF ISBN: 0375401466 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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