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Cargando... Love and the Mess We're Inpor Stephen Marche
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When Viv flies to Buenos Aires for a secret liaison with Clive, there is no ambiguity as to their intentions-adultery. But this is where conventionality terminates in Stephen Marche's new novel, Love and the Mess We're In, a work whose lyric richness and inventiveness skillfully embody the tumbles and turns of love in a postmodern age. Marche collaborates with award-winning typographer Andrew Steeves to create richly polyschematic book pages whose influences range from the interwoven texts, geometric shaping and pattern-making of Hebraic calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts and incunabular typography to the ordered tangle of a New York City subway map. Viv's husband, Tim, is Clive's best friend. A breakdown has landed Tim in a mental institution, seemingly beyond recovery. His collapse brings Viv and Clive together in their grief, at a loss to navigate the loneliness, guilt, lust and, perhaps, love which they discover in their unsettling and morally ambiguous new context. Love and the Mess We're In is an evocative, lithe story of love and redemption infused with Marche's wit, insight and telescopic emotional range. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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trauerspiel' to use Marche's own phrase - and make it different, fresh, unique, a standout in a reader's mind? Marche's ambitious novel strikes out to do just that, using sparse evocative prose and typography that isn't exactly e-book friendly.
It is not just the typography that takes this book into the realm of experimental fiction. Marche exposes the reader to a restaurant conversation between the soon to be lovers by having the reader follow the verbal conversation by focusing the eyes towards the book's inner spine and reading the text left and right of the spine while progressing in a downward fashion of the open pages. The lovers' private thoughts during their conversation are depicted as outside edge margin notes. A different, unique way to tell a story and slightly mentally fatiguing from my point of view to continually jump around the pages to get the whole picture. Luckily, that was the method used for only part of the story.
The prose is what carried me through the story, that and the surprisingly tantalizing typographic changes. Marche plays with the written word with a skill that transforms the spartan into the eloquent with a minimal use of words. The thick, creamy linen type paper used in the printed book shows the attention to aesthetic details the publishers, Gaspereau Press Limited, put into the books they publish.
There is nothing overly likeable about the characters... or anything overly memorable about them for that matter. If Marche was trying to go for a presentation of average individuals, then I think he hit his mark. The plot was somewhat weak as well. It is really the prose and the typography that turns this otherwise mundane story into something rather exceptional.
Overall, a different type of presentation to an otherwise unremarkable story and not something that I would easy recommend to other readers without have a good understanding of the types of books that would appeal to them. ( )