Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Time Top Ten Fiction Book of 2014
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A BBC Top Ten Book of 2014
"Exquisite...As inspiring in its way as Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids." --Los Angeles Times
"Briskly addictive . . . Told in the voice of a female rock Ulysses." --O, the Oprah Magazine
"Marvelous . . . D'Erasmo conjures up the seedy, sexy spectacle of life on the road with amazing vividness, and fills in the inner life of a woman who has one last chance to get her voice heard." --Lev Grossman, Time
Anna Brundage is a rock star. She was an overnight indie sensation, but lost her fame just as fast as she found it. Now forty-four, she pours everything into a comeback, selling her famous father's art to finance an album and a European tour. A riveting look at the life of a musician and the moving story of a woman's unconventional path, Wonderland is a glimpse of how it feels when a wish just might come true.
"Anna made me think of Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, mixed with a little bit of Janis." -- Paste
"Richly interior . . . What makes Anna such a powerful narrator is her seductive desire to keep her options open." -- Washington Post
Rezensionen (4)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
On her comeback tour, a decade separated from her heyday, musician Anna Brundage zigzags across Europe with a new album, Wonderland; a new manager; and a new band, in the commanding latest from D'Erasmo (The Sky Below). Along the way, she tackles her roller-coaster past-her relationship with her artist father; her affair with Simon, a married father of two; an abortion-and seeks atonement. Spoken in Anna's voice and structured with a fragmented chronology, the novel intersperses moments from multiple tours and recording sessions with personal letters and meditations, creating a spellbinding look into the protagonist's being. Characters like the glammed-out Billy Q and the drug-addled Ezra weave in and out of Anna's tour like ghosts, as Anna and her bandmates-Zach, Alicia, and Tom-live life on the road, where romance is fleeting, where friends come and go, and where a savior can be found in the darkest of moments. A story of second chances, D'Erasmo has meticulously crafted a work that, with the exception of a small lull midnovel, constantly builds, yet often feels incredibly casual. Days and shows pass, but within this routine, a transformation slowly creeps into the narrative: that of commitment, and, perhaps, hope for the future. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
*Starred Review* D'Erasmo avoids cliches in this rhapsodic portrait of a rock-and-roll diva like a champion slalom skier racing downhill without touching a single pole. As she has in her three previous novels, D'Erasmo (The Sky Below, 2008) perceptively aligns insights into the emotional tangles of family relationships with an imaginative and gleaning inquiry into the nature of creativity and how making art coheres and disrupts everyday life. The daughter of artists, Anna stoically navigated an itinerant, bohemian childhood, which she revisits in long, vivid ruminations during her exhausting and exciting European tours, with stops in Rome, Hamburg, a festival in Latvia, a French chateau, and a hippie enclave on a Copenhagen island. She often replays time spent with her famous father, her polestar, who is revered for reinventing sculpture by cutting a train in half. Anna, too, has a proclivity for demolition, which she channels into her burrowing, pummeling, and explosive music. Close to excruciatingly observant, often lonely, sharply funny, and prone to problematic love, Anna is an irresistible narrator. D'Erasmo brings us inside the music and the musician's psyche in this transfixing song of a self evolving through discovery, loss, and renewal.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
MUCH LIKE SMELL (it's all very well to say that something smells "like an orange," but how do you describe the smell of an orange?), music is notoriously difficult to evoke on the page. The fact that language has musical attributes - rhythm, melody, tone - isn't much help when you're trying to express Bartok or Captain Beef-heart in words. Even when music has lyrics, its essence is antilanguage, or at least in another language - and an inability to translate explains why so many album and concert reviews are unreadable. Thus Stacey D'Erasmo's most impressive accomplishment in her fourth novel, "Wonderland," is to write about music well. Her narrator, Anna Brundage, is a 44-year-old rock has-been who abandoned her singing career seven years earlier. Before she quit, the leggy singer with wild red hair had carved out a reputation in certain discerning circles as an edgy indie artist with an idiosyncratic voice. The sound of her seminal albums achieved for her fans that intoxicating ability to summon whole eras of their lives (another thing music and smell have in common). Anna "was famous only among certain people. The smart people, the people who pride themselves on being smart." Rousing from her fallow retirement, during which she has taught carpentry to the girls at a private elementary school on the Upper East Side of New York, Anna records a comeback album, "Wonderland," and hits the road with her band in Europe. It has been just little enough time that the "smart people" still remember her music with those nostalgic time-and-place associations, and Anna is "not above selling back to them their memory of their younger selves." The present tense of the story addresses the potentially rich subject matter of the second act, the second chance, the possibility of self-resurrection before it's too late. The timeline of the book jags back and forth, darting from this comeback tour to tours previous, with their attendant romances, with flashbacks to Anna's childhood, which was dominated by her eccentric father, Roy, an iconoclastic artist. Roy Brundage was famous for deconstructing buildings and other large-scale infrastructures, creating a cross between installation and performance art. One of his signature works involved cutting a train in half lengthwise and splitting it open like a piece of fruit. Selling a chunk of her father's perforated Irish lighthouse to an art dealer finances both Anna's recording of "Wonderland" and her touring expenses, to her more conventional sister's horror. The scale of Anna's career is just right. A niche musician who has found an audience in "certain circles" is far more interesting than a Beyoncé-style pop star. And the disappointing slow fade and distractions of personal life that ended Anna's earlier musical career make for better material than the clichéd rock 'n' roll crash-and-burn born of drugs and booze. The nature of her father's art, too, is just right - both ingeniously conceived and believable. Roy's fate provides the novel with pertinent pathos. His health was destroyed when one deconstruction grew too radical and he nearly died from the crush of a collapsing marble wall. Worse, when he does die late in the novel, forcing Anna to return, midtour, to his now torturously quaint studio in Vermont to sort out his affairs, she finds that he has been repeatedly painting pictures of the field outside his studio window - badly. Iconoclasm has corrupted into the saccharine: "all the empty prettiness, the easy, lazy appeal to the viewer. Where is the man who broke the train in half? ... Hard to tell if he was killed by the field, or if he suffocated himself with it, mouth stuffed with wildflowers." Implicitly, the lesson for Anna is that artistic vitality should never be taken for granted, must be seized while still within reach. CERTAINLY THE BEST passages in "Wonderland" are about music. Recording her first album, Anna realized "the central importance of the unheard chord, the chord that is never played, the chord that happens after the music ends....It's the sound you don't quite hear, the reverberation coming off the top or the side or the edges of the note. Not a silence but a potential sound....The unheard chord feels like, must feel like, a memory." Thus she became "the girl of the stumbling half note, the note that thrilled the smart people of 2002 and made them feel the heroism of that stumbling.... My sound was the sound of the gap, the place where the seams show." Indeed, when Anna says she "became, for a season, a verb" and explains that in those days Brundaging "meant tearing up the sound, erasing half of it, sending it skittering over the abyss," she connects her own art with her father's. Unfortunately, we're rounding on a major reservation here. The broken chronology costs the novel momentum, and narrative drive is further undermined by frequent short, interspersed chapters of pure poetic reflection. Proportionally, the story is too heavily weighted toward the past, an emphasis at odds with a theme of second chances, which you'd imagine would involve a fair bit of gung-ho forward thrust. Far too little happens in the novel's present. Some gigs go well, others poorly. Life on the road is well captured, but almost too well: It's always another hotel, another venue, another town. We see a great deal of lying around, as well as a fair bit of sleeping around, and the obligatory fallings-out between band members. There's a sameness to these sections, a levelness to the trajectory. Too many scenes could have been included, and could have been cut - because they contribute no causal connective tissue to the plot. Through the last third of the book, you keep waiting for the big moment - a triumph or catastrophe, either would do - but neither arrives. The father's death doesn't suffice. He has been off-camera for too long, and the novel hasn't been sold to the reader as a story about a father-daughter relationship. Anna's passion for her most consuming love interest, a married-with-children Lebanese architect who lives in Switzerland, is diluted by a handful of flings with men who mean little to her. Besides, this isn't primarily a novel about romance, either. The focus from the initial pages is Anna's musical career, which mostly just, well - continues. Ultimately, the problem with "Wonderland" is erotic. The book is literary tantric sex: it doesn't climax. Sure, along the way, passage after passage is more than agreeable, just as intercourse can be perfectly enjoyable when it doesn't result in orgasm. Yet when novels go tantric, the effect is a mildness, a pleasantness, a quietness antithetical to the raw power D'Erasmo ascribes to Anna's music. Lacking crescendo or catharsis, this ends up being a smaller novel than it might have been. Yet D'Erasmo is a gifted and skillful writer. Her language is often vital: a "fullon, rotting midsummer" in New York; the "sonic bricolage" of Anna's creative inspiration; a young woman's "exclamatory" curly hair. How exasperating, then, that she didn't construct a larger, more dynamic armature around which to wrap her prose, and so employ her command of her craft to greater effect. D'Erasmo addresses the second act, the second chance, the possibility of self-resurrection. LIONEL SHRIVER'S most recent novel is "Big
Library Journal-Rezension
D'Erasmo's fourth novel (after The Sky Below) tells the story of fictional musician Anna Brundage. Anna is in her mid-40s and touring Europe for what may be the last time, promoting an album recorded on her own dime after a seven-year hiatus. Along for the ride are her attractive young backing band and a nagging manager who attempts to drum up enthusiasm through social media and shared gigs with slightly more famous musicians. While we cannot hear the music they play, the songs are described in rich detail, as they are a key part of our narrator's inner world. The tour gives Anna a chance to reflect on her career and childhood, which was itself a sort of world tour with her artist parents. These vivid recollections create a kaleidoscope of magical experiences and colors, from the black water of the Baltic Sea at night to Anna's wild red hair. VERDICT The plot may remind readers of Jennifer Egan's popular A Visit from the Goon Squad, but D'Erasmo's writing is more dreamy and sentimental than Egan's. The rock-star lifestyle, with its drugs, troubled relationships, and whirlwind tours, has been penned many times; while Wonderland is well written, it serves as just another example. [See Prepub Alert, 11/22/13.]-Kate Gray, Shrewsbury P.L., MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.