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Title: A Walking Guide: A Novel by Alan S. Cowell ISBN: 0-7432-4470-2 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Contemplating The Final Transition
Comment: While reading Alan S. Cowell's deeply felt, exquisitely rendered first novel I found myself thinking repeatedly about literature that dominated a bygone era of existential discourse. Books by novelists such as Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry and, to a lesser extent, even the early work of the semi-surrealist writer Paul Bowles. I believe this association was occasioned by both the subject matter of A Walking Guide and its style of execution. As for the former, in this study of a daring, successful war correspondent at the end of his long career Cowell explores in contemporaneous narrative and action-filled flashback travel to exotic places, adventure deeply permeated by danger of a sort that pits the individual against inimical forces outside of his control (thus providing a test of just what one is made of), and the final travail of the male ego as it encounters and then is forced to confront the inroads of age and disability as they encroach upon youthful fantasies of omnipotence and immortality. Reinforcing the evocation of an erstwhile era, the writing itself seemed somewhat anachronistic stylistically, purposefully crafted in such a way as to revert the reader's sensibility to a simpler time than the one we currently inhabit; a time that precedes our post-modern age which is replete with technology and distraction from personal angst and the necessity to come to terms with inherent limitations of the self and, even more importantly, the body within which that self resides. Briefly, the plot of A Walking Guide concerns the desire of its protagonist, Joe Shelby, to provide himself with an outsized challenge on familiar terrain after having been diagnosed with motor neuron disease as he approaches fifty years of age. A tremendously virile individual up to this moment of his life, Joe is quickly losing the use of both his left arm and leg and has been told that the rest of his body will soon follow along a dreaded route of inevitable muscular failure.Terrified that he will be faced with immobility and dependence on others for subsistence, this proud, incredibly strong and willful man undertakes a final journey to relive the glory of the past. Of course, his decision to climb the highest peak in England alone, and in an already weakened state, places Joe in sufficient jeopardy to create 'passively' the conditions for a preemptive suicide so that he might avoid having to face the ultimate horror of being buried alive inside himself as his disease progresses. Cowell works systematically with a number of terribly difficult universal questions as his vulnerable protagonist struggles with destiny in a late summer freak snow storm on the mountain. Foremost amongst these questions are how exactly are we as sentient creatures to cope with the prospect of our own demise and, by extension, what is our responsibility (to ourselves and to others who figure significantly in our lives) for the form of our own death as we move along the inexorable trajectory to oblivion? Because the end of one's life requires that choices be made and actions taken no less than at any other point in a personal history. Not only as a way of shaping and finalizing a meaningful narrative of the self, but more critically, as a way of completing the crucial task of discharging one's final responsibilities to those whom we love.
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Title: A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by GIL COURTEMANCHE, PATRICIA CLAXTON ISBN: 1400041074 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0374166447 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff ISBN: 0802117554 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967 by David Maraniss ISBN: 0743217802 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: L'Affaire by Diane Johnson ISBN: 052594740X Publisher: Dutton Books Pub. Date: 25 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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