Get It Now Mount Terminus Envisioned By David Grand Conveyed In Digital Copy

Grand's Mount Terminus is a dark, majestic novel about art, family, overwhelming love, and the birth of Los Angeles


After his mother's death, young Bloom boards a train with his bereaved father, Jacob, to travel west across mountains and deserts to California: Mount Terminus, their new home at the desolate end of the world.
There, in a villa built atop a rare desert spring, they live apart from society, supported by the income from Jacob's invention, the Rosenbloom Loop, a piece of technology that has revolutionized the nascent art of filmmaking.
There, Bloom grows up in the shadow of his father's grief, with only a pair of servants, the house's ghosts, and his own artistic muse for company.

But Jacob can't forever protect his family from his pastthe dramatic series of events that has taken him from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on New York City's Lower East Side and into the graces of beautiful twin girls, and finally to this fragile refuge in preHollywood Los Angeles.
And Bloom, now an eccentric dark genius, can't live alone at the top of the mountain forever, Prodded by his newly discovered half brother, in every way his opposite, Bloom will have to come down to meet the world.
Otherwise the orange farmers and the vaqueros, the speculators and the developers, the artists and the barons of the silver screen, will surely come up the mountain to meet him.

Triumphant and enthralling, Mount Terminus marks a magnificent return for David Grand it's the novel he was born to write.
Three is generous. Interesting story, boringly told. I hated the writing style and I had a very hard time paying attention to it, Mount Terminus has an ambitious narrative scope, but it is a book that you can open at random and read a section or two, filled as it is with wonderfully crafted descriptive passages, which moment by moment illuminate the main character Joseph Rosenbloom nicknamed Bloom.
Perhaps my favorite passage of this sort is found in the section titled Love, Here we experience Bloom overcoming his reticence toward intimacy through the description of an optical device called the invertiscope.
The writing is both technical and lyrical, and the effect is that we literally experience a new perceptionI have never seen that image except for in this novelas Bloom experiences romantic love for the first time.
The figurative possibilities are accessible and coherent, but the scene does not ask for you to solve for them as a puzzle.
Rather you are buoyed by the beautifully balanced sentences and paragraphs, For example, notice the way Grand handles this moment of consequence: “She guided him through the grove, around lowlying limbs, walked him under the canopy of trees jeweled in ripe summer fruit, and there in the shade he looked down on himself and Isabella as a bird might.
” There are just so many moments like this in the pages, I don't think he put a word wrong, I give this novel my highest praise: I will read it again, Set in the early years of theth century, Mount Terminus chronicles the rise of the film industry and the growth of Los Angeles through the eyes of Joseph Rosenbloom, most often referred to as Bloom.
Blooms father is a millionaire due to his invention, a device that allowed the smooth projection of film.

When Blooms mother dies, his father takes him to Mount Terminus, California, to raise Bloom in isolation on the house on the hill.
The elder Rosenbloom feels that his money has created a world where his son will always be taken care of, but he hasnt counted on the fact that no matter how hard you try, the world will always find its way in and pain will enter every life.


The prose is dense but not slow reading, The story has epic proportions and reads like a grim fairy tale: sibling betrayals in two generations, a stolen birthright and more, good and evil twins, a quest.
Bloom is the innocent to whom things happen rather than a person who makes things happen he is a puer who takes forever to mature.
Bloom is not, in fact, a particularly interesting character, but enough adventures happen to and around him that the story kept my interest.
The story is not just about Bloom its about love and art and unwise grandiosity, It reads like a long dream that you dont really want to have end,
This is an odd and beautiful book, It overlays both the distant and even farther distant past of California with a fairytale like structure of two brothers born of the same fathers and twin sisters.
The book evokes the genocide of the Native Californians, the life of the Californios, the early movie industry, and the development of water and land in Southern California, through the strangely symbiotic relationship between the brothers, both Jewish, one a reclusive artist and the other a ruthless builder.
After a strong opening, it descended into a tooliterate magical realism, Clumsy, hamhanded, predictable, boring, sophomoric, selfconscious, It tries too hard and wants to be scholarly, but the voice is cloying and derivative, Is phantasmagorical, but he isn't Gogol! It's overstylized melodrama, I wanted to like this novel but found it strangely inert, A few sectionsfor example Jacob Rosenbloom's youth and trainingwere bright and engaging, but the majority of the novel seems observed through a Mt.
Terminus dust storm.

Let's say.stars. I was excited to dig into this novel but I guess I needed a bigger shovel,pages was all I could manage, The narrative is very distant and dryreportorial is maybe the word, The characters seemed like cardboard cut outs with the emotional stenciled on top, Life's too short so I shelved this one, Mount Terminus is a highly densely written book with Steinbeckian epic potential that just does not realise itself.
While reading the fitst part I was wondering if this was in fact some mystery story, due to the grim tone of it, but in the second part it moved to lighter material and seemed to cover the development of the film industry.
Subsequently it attempted to increase the suspense and deal with brotherly betrayal, but that story never managed to reach a climax either.
Finally, a love story without the slightest emotional expression but with some unexpected twists was in fact the most interesting part.

The strength of the book is the use of language, The weakness are the many unconvincing plot lines, lack of true emotional expression of all characters and some odd details, such as pointless but very explicit sex scenes and why is everyone Jewish It is not about the de elopment of Los Angeles either, for it could have been set anywhere.

It's a good read, but has too many complications to want to read another novel by this author.
I'm always in awe of books that take me to another time and place, but even more in awe of the ones that take me into another's internal reality so wholly and completely that I'm unaware I crossed a line.


I became lost in Bloom's perceived worlds and thoughts, and lost in the descriptions of a villa on Mount Terminus so grand that I would love to let it swallow me whole.
And I found in the relationship between Bloom and his brother a beautiful, delicate balance of counterparts that reveals the meaning of truth, sacrifice and deceit in familial relationships.


Despite the uniqueness of each character, I could find in each a reflection of myself, The book expresses humanity in a painfully dark, creative story of a boy who is forced to live in two worlds ours and the one of his own creation.


David Grand writes and writes wonderfully in this postmodern novel so dark and complex you can't help but feel a part of Bloom's budding truth and allconsuming passions.


This will be a reread,

Make no mistake this is an astonishingly good novel, In fact, its as good as it is ambitious which is really saying something because what this sets out to do in literary terms would make a run at high political office appear like a soft option.
There is so much packed into these three hundred and sixtyfour pages that it could have easily sprouted into something of biblical proportions.
Gothic, baroque fairly tales filled with blood, vengeance and bad romance, sibling jealousies repeated over generations and that old chestnut of art versus commerce just for starters.
This fantasy somehow combines, along with real the real life horrors of the First World War and an improvised rendering of the birth of Hollywood to keep this dense but absorbing story moving forward.


Its the turn of theth Century and Jacob Rosenbloom lives on a mountaintop estate in Southern California.
His fortune stems from his invention, the Rosenbloom loop which regulates the flow of film through Thomas Edisons Kinetoscope.
In the nascent world of film making this is to the moving picture what the propeller is to moving plane.
There is dark and violent history to the Mount Terminus estate contained in its secret catacombs and revealed to Rosenblooms son, Bloom by their deaf mute maid.
The younger Bloom, artistic but sheltered by his dour, unavailable father is at the center of the tale.
Blooms own existence owes itself to the rivalry between his mother and her sister and its this dark scandal that emotionally cripples Blooms father.
Just like the loop that the elder Rosenbloom invented, history seems destined to repeat itself in the form of Blooms Machiavellian movie mogul brother, Simon, a kind of Samuel Goldwyn figure surely its a sly nod to the Goldwyn inspiration that Simon has a history in glove making

With the plot at times threatening spread its wings and take flight Grand skillfully manages to keep the whole thing grounded by his coolly efficient prose.
Its not easily done. When a writer possesses the skills this author does, there is a tendency to show what you can do.
To unnecessarily

pad and elaborate, Grand prefers the Miles Davis approach, Its not what you put in but rather what you leave out that counts, Its hardly surprising that this epic took a decade to write because this is not a pop culture, stream of consciousness undertaking.
I get the sense that each one of these paragraphs and sentences went through an Olympic like qualifying process to make it onto the page.
Like spools of film left on the cutting room floor, only the leanest, most honed lines made the final draft.


Then theres the story itself, With this kind of constantly meandering, evolving tale there must have been a danger for the plot to get lost inside its own bowels, to get so convoluted that the original thread became invisible Its a credit to Grand and perhaps his editor that this never happens.
I was always curious to know what happened next and never able to predict it, Also, grounding this was the believability of the characters, particularly Bloom and Isabella who find themselves tied in a gripping, emotionally complex knot.
Throw in the movie director, Gottlieb for comic relief, the dark shadow of the ruthlessly ambitious Simon, the melancholic mysterious Estella marooned and mourning on her love island, along with cadre of colorful and corruptible sidemen and you have a work, penned by a wordsmith at the top of his game, which will leave you breathless by its brilliance.
David Grands Mount Terminus is an ultimate comingofage story it also concerns itself with the comingofage of an artist: the protagonist, Bloom.
Beyond the journeying, the discovering of self, Grand gracefully builds a dramatic and subtle interior and exterior world.


The serious business here is that Grand has written an essential origin story that builds like layers of limestone.
His complicated characters grow into in a world that doesnt quite exist yet premodern Los Angeles and this central question of origin asserts itself as a universal and spiritual focus for his inhabitants.


Mount Terminus is a book that dives deep, What I like most is its assured originality, its surprising strangeness, I think there is much to be said, in our own modern age of disappearing attention spans and rapidly changing technology, about newness and how or why we should embrace change.
We must and we are better off for it, Invention and modernity exist at the core of Blooms California, and these are also the reasons to embrace this serious text.
There is a lot to discover and love,

Grands landscapes are culled from the hard earth of the American West and are just as beautifully written the language is much like the landscapes he invents familiar and packed with so much time, so much life.
Through Bloom, Grand takes the time to name what he sees in the new world, the beginning of everything we take for granted.


Beyond the landscape are the technologies of early filmmaking: phasmatropes, kinetoscopes, zoetropes, and the glass telescope through which Bloom watches the world of Hollywood being built below him.
The story has a way of bringing us in close and far away sometimes at the same time so that we may feel “the thrill of being present at the focal point.
”

Perhaps what is most moving about this epic novel is that Grand takes the creators command of the recognizable: strained familial relationships, new technologies, the emergence of an entire landscape, the interior life of an artist.
Between the beautiful and skillful language, and the verbal and visual communication between characters, we, the readers, may feel as if weve just walked out of one of Blooms brilliant films, as if well “walk out of the darkness into the light as changed people.
”.