A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall [electronic resource] : A Novel

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Beschreibung:

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall is an exuberant literary debut--a novel of real ideas and a playful examination of our in-between world, one that explores the nature of family, identity, art, and belief while also marking the introduction of an original new voice in contemporary fiction.Owen Burr is the six-foot-eight, Olympics-bound senior captain of the Stanford University water polo team. In his final collegiate match, however, he suffers a catastrophic injury that destroys his hopes and dreams, flattening his entire world into two dimensions. His identity as an athlete erased but his ambition indelible, he defies his father, a classics professor who lives in a "cave" of his own making, and moves to Berlin with naive plans to make conceptual art. Then he disappears.Without a single clue as to his son's location, Dr. Burr embarks upon a tour of public lectures from Greece to Germany to Iceland in an attempt to draw out his endangered son. Instead, he foments a violent uprising.

Verlag:

HarperCollins,

Datum:

2014

Digitales Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Sprache:

Englisch

Zusammenfassung

Owen Burr is the six-foot-eight, Olympics-bound senior captain of the Stanford University water polo team. In his final collegiate match, however, he suffers a catastrophic injury that destroys his hopes and dreams, flattening his entire world into two dimensions. His identity as an athlete erased but his ambition indelible, he defies his father, a classics professor who lives in a "cave" of his own making, and moves to Berlin with naive plans to make conceptual art. Then he disappears.

Without a single clue as to his son's location, Dr. Burr embarks upon a tour of public lectures from Greece to Germany to Iceland in an attempt to draw out his endangered son. Instead, he foments a violent uprising.

Rezensionen (3)

Publisher's Weekly-Rezension

While preparing to compete in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Stanford water polo star Owen Burr is struck in the face by another player, losing an eye, along with any hope of a medal. So Owen, the son of a respected classics professor, slips away to Berlin to try his hand at making art. There, he falls in with the world-famous-and slippery-artist Kurt Wagener and disappears. While Owen's father launches a new career as a social theorist to facilitate a trip through Europe during which he can search for his missing son, Kurt offers to promote Owen as an "outsider artist" at Art Basel, one of the world's premier art expos. In the lead-up to the show, Kurt keeps Owen in seclusion at his Berlin studio. Owen discovers too late that his new collaborator cannot be trusted, after Kurt tricks him into giving up his intellectual property rights and feeds him dangerous drugs. Meanwhile, his father-branded a terrorist after making an explosive speech in Athens-hunts for clues to his boy's whereabouts. Chancellor's debut is a twisting, globe-trotting affair that unfortunately suffers from poor pacing and frequently dwells on the mundane. The result is a mixed bag, unsure of its own identity, like many of the book's characters. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus-Rezension

A father searches for his vanished son in this edgily comic first novel, which has fun with the worlds of art and academia.California athlete Owen Burr loses an eye in a college water polo match and his berth in the Athens Olympics. He impulsively goes to Berlin to become an artist and gets embroiled in the drug-fueled machinations of an art-world star. Back in the U.S., Owens widowed father, classics professor Joseph Burr, has heard nothing from or about Owen until he receives a disturbing hospital report. His efforts to rescue his son start with a lecture he gives near the site of the games that is meant to signal Owen. But when a provocateur runs onstage and hands Joseph a Molotov cocktail, the stunned academic's effort to throw it safely away from the audience ends in a fiery explosion, and a riot ensues. More violence at Art Basel, a hungry polar bear in Iceland, the theories of Laminalism and Liminalism, and a helpful Siren named Stevie are part of the Continental odyssey during which Burr pre et fils manage to constantly stay out of touch with each other. Yet sometimes, unknowingly, theyre in sync: Each finds himself challenged by camping equipment in separate, humorous scenes. Chancellor, in a rare misstep, has Owen kick down a 60-pound German door the same day he leaves a hospital barely able to walk. That aside, the author maintains an almost thrillerlike pace while taking well-aimed shots at academic and art-market fads and helping two lost souls through essential transformations. Its a bracingly rich mlange of a novel in which scholarship spotlights Al Pacinos Scarface and plain exposition suddenly turns into prose that might be noirish or downright strange: Everything of value stretched and shrapneled, lapping the circular walls in lethal vorticity.Some readers may stumble over the Latin, argot and allusions, but these are minor challenges in Chancellors polymorphous entertainment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist-Rezension

Chancellor's intelligent debut novel follows the parallel tracks of father and son as they navigate a summer of personal and professional transformation. Professor Burr flees America to find his son, Owen, who leaves Stanford after being blinded in one eye during a water polo match. Owen wants to be an artist the novel never really clarifies why and Professor Burr wants to be a public intellectual or leftist revolutionary or at least famous. In Europe, each encounters an over-the-top provocateur; even as satire, these characters strain credulity and sap emotional impact from the story. The novel's long denouement indulges an unexpected maritime romance. Owen's observations of his paramour, and a world he struggles to feel at home in, can be quite moving: The sunblush on her cheeks made her eyes seem impossibly blue, a milky opalescent blue with the same promise a drowning man sees when his foot is pinned in the reef and he looks up to the bright sky. --Clouther, Kevin Copyright 2010 Booklist

Zusammenfassung

Zusammenfassung

Rezensionen (3)

Publisher's Weekly-Rezension

Kirkus-Rezension

Booklist-Rezension

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