Sign-In
Cart
The Defectors
Hardcover
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781733938884
Publisher: Messianic Jewish Publ
Published: Jan 17 2020
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
In his final interview, Roberto Bolaño says, I would like to have been a homicide detective, much more than a writer... I'd have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime, alone by night...
This aloneness, this perfect solitude, is very much at the core of The Defectors, a book of odd and uncanny episodes about people trying to defect from reality. There is a secret policeman in 80s communist Prague who becomes obsessed with a fiercely independent female detective novelist. There is a Buddhist psychotherapist who travels around Amerika offering the talking cure in a Volkswagen Beetle. There is an adjunct professor in Russian émigré Brooklyn who quits his job to build a Golem made of stainless steel.
As the book progresses, the episodes become increasingly experimental. Ultimately, like particles in a supercollider, they get smashed together and fly apart. And we get a brief glimpse of something new, some never-before-seen particle, a cosmic thought.
1 different editions
Also available
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback