Discover Stephen Florida Edited By Gabe Habash Format Printable Format

Habash has constructed one of the most interesting and convincing character studies with STEPHEN FLORIDA that I've read in recent memory Young college wrestler Stephen Florida is indeed a troubled young man Picture a modern violent and focused Holden Caulfield suited up in a onesie and you'll have a pretty accurate image of Florida Obsession is a clear theme throughout this novel and Habash does an incredible job of building an incredibly detailed anti hero in Florida a man who begins the story with nothing on his mind but a national championship And yet despite the reader's understanding that Florida is a deeply flawed individual capable of many uncomfortable actions and thoughts Habash has given his main character so many levels that we cannot help but to root for this brutish thinker every time he sets foot on the matbe it in the very real sense or the proverbial one to wrestle is demons within his own mind As Florida's final year in college progresses he's assaulted from every angle by the much bigger picture uestions of love familial loss and just what to do with his life As the tension mounts Florida's world begins to disintegrate with a stunning realism For fans of the film Foxcatcher and the seminal novel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE STEPHEN FLORIDA is simply a must read In fact in this age of our shunning any focus on mental illness the book should be reuired reading for an America that continues to grow insular and isolated not just from the rest of the world but from one another What a strange strange utterly intriguing novel The prose style is so staccato so relentless in its commitment to be what it is This is not a book that is going to cater to the reader or to anyone's expectations of what a novel should be how a protagonist should be how a story should read The writer's commitment to the prose style is just mind blowing Writing like this takes guts This isn't a book I could love but it is a book I will forever admire for its ambition and execution Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season when every practice every match is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity Profane manic and tipping into the uncanny it's a story of loneliness obsession and the drive to leave a mark this left me breathless when i recover recovered the premise of this book is entirely irrelevant to the what this book is like or what it does in fact i have no idea what this book does or what is about though i'll try to say something about this in a minute but here is the premise stephen florida the strange last name is the result of a clerical error stephen decides not to fix is the star of a north dakota university wrestling team and his one dream is to win the division championship in kenosha in his senior year he has no ambition other than that and if i remember correctly no life goals of any kind including life itself after that so let me talk about a Hanya Yanagihara's enthusiastic endorsement of this first novel and b the cover i have no idea if gabe and hanya are MFA buddies or MFA teacher student but what i know is if hanya endorses a book it is likely to beawesomeweird as hell andweird in the most awesome way possible witness yanagihara's first novel The People in the Trees a jaw dropping masterpiece of weirdness daring and writerly self assurance gabe habash too seems to be uite undaunted by The First Novel he goes all out on the weird the cover is gorgeous but has nothing to do with anything as it should just so you know no large feline appears in this novel and the novel is not set in the evergladesthe closest i can come to box this book is in coming of age but heck this is some coming of age the most conventional coming of age feature of the book is the love story but that too is if not exactly weird then complex and intense and adult this is writerly fireworks a fabulous journey into the mind and adventures of an unpleasant character by the end i wanted to be stephen's personal savior a deep gaze into the heartbreak of teenage masculinity a hard look at madness and a major kick ass vindication of all the mad paranoid obsessed people who find mad paranoid obsessive ways to keep themselves afloat also if you are looking for a story

yeah there is a hell of a story this is for you simon Coarse poetic and bleak Stephen Florida is a novel about obsession and loneliness Stephen Florida a senior on a wrestling scholarship at a small private college in North Dakota has one remaining raison d'être to win the Division IV NCAA championship in his weight classHis singlemindedness drives him into some dark spaces and when disaster strikes he retreats into a depression that borders on madness Stephen is our narrator and a most unreliable one at that His voice is reminiscent of Holden Caulfieldwry and self reflectiveand yet somehow so very innocent and unaware It is impossible not to be caught up in Stephen's creepily charming Eeyore like affect a young man full of his own blunt force yet terrified of the gunk that lives in the shower drain certain it is a substance alive and sinister He and his teammates adhere to a brutal physical regimen counting calories and pummeling bodies Gabe Habash describes the discipline and desperation of these athletes so that you feel and smell their dripping sweat are beside them in steaming gym basements on wrestling mats slippery with their exertionStephen is distracted by love early in this first semester and you feel him moving toward the light of hope and redemption buoyed by a sweet and steady love But distraction won't win him the trophy he covets As his grip with reality slips his eyes on the prize darken with desperation Habash writes with confidence and tight sharply honed skills This novel is a character sketch with profundity and nuance It is masculine and weird tethered to reality and yet hovering above it like the character of Stephen himself I found it original and disconcerting it is an unforgettable read yet I was ready to move on beyond its barren landscapes and desperate emotions Recommended with a slight intake of breath indicating hesitation Give me a disturbed narrator and I'm generally in love from the get go In that light Steven Forster a collegiate wrestler accidentally dubbed with the wrong name by an aging nearsighted school registrar should have made my heart throb Mistakes bubble in and out of his story He starts his life wrapped in an error that manifests in a better chance for success his vanished twin has given him two placentas from which to draw strength An accident kills his parents when he is young A green notebook is mistakenly left where he can find it When this obsessive and relentless young wrestler makes an error on the mat a tangible price is exacted and he becomes stranger yet Until Stephen Florida makes that mistake and ends up suffering a torn meniscus somewhere around the halfway point I'm sorry to say that the book initially bored me nearly to tears despite it being peppered with philosophical meanderings and dark tension His love interest Mary Beth can abide anything she says except boredom I'm with ya girlThe good stuff great mood setting and high creep factor The author puts The Big O into Obsessiveness and that is exceptionally well done here For those of you who follow collegiate wrestling the matches and moves ring pretty true although there were a LOT of them I read that the author has a family member maybe an uncle who used to wrestle and that he went over all the wrestling scenes carefully to tweak them John Irving would be proud Off the mats since he is in the weight class ofpounds Stephen Florida eats like a ballerina or an anorexic or a jockeyagain very realisticThe freaky stuff There is an offscreen character Stephen calls the frog man who may or may not slip him notes under his dorm room door or whisper to him through an old CB radio and via a vinyl album We hear of old incidents with disemboweled goats and encounter a gorilla mask twice and present day goats twice There is a scary roustabout named Shane who will give you the willies and the last few sentences will make you wonderCautionary stuff there are myriad discussions of snot vomit and other bodily things best not thought about I got the vague feeling that the author was trying to echo Eileen a bit but to lesser effect for me They just pointlessly disgusted me here particularly the recycling of Chinese take out By this point in the story it was an unnecessary and over the top bit of drama to yet again show how odd Stephen Florida wasThe following critiues might blow the story for you so they are tagged as suchview spoilerWhat didn't work for me there were too many dead ends for my taste the Frog Man Aunt Lorraine Fink's wife the jazz professor his bestie from elementary school Shane and his horrifying book on the bottom shelf Masha the cleaning lady and the green notebook I'd say Mary Beth was a dead end too but I'm hoping she showed up I know that I'm supposed to feel great empathy because this young man lost his parents and later his elderly grandmother but he doesn't really reminisce about them We dont see a single particle of grief Yes I get that he is a narcissist but my emotional connection to him just wasn't there even though other reprehensible anti heroes do have me rooting for them in other novels We even read about various suicidal texts in the story but not caring for the main character at all I never feared for him going down that path Let me reiterate that I generally LOVE a despicable narrator have you read A Feast of Snakes or Loner but not so with Stephen FloridaFactual blunders I'm the sciency type and can be badly distracted by booboos A baby cannot be connected to two placentas B One is not fed Salisbury steak the night before surgery you are not permitted to get yourself home after surgery and the patient is in enormous pain for days after and reuires meds lots of ice and help The fact that a meniscus repair is reflected by a C shaped incision means that the book is likely set in the past when this type surgery was far invasivepainful than today C Roustabouts hired for drilling companies are not brought on duty in the way written in here at all I know first hand about placenta issues meniscus surgery and drilling operations and these were errors he could have easily avoided hide spoiler.