Grab Your Edition El Lago (Miscelánea) Illustrated By E.L. Doctorow Published As Digital Edition
book was engaging and distinctive in its style of writing, The main characters were well defined and I was invested in learning about them, However, the distinctive part was the authors use of timing and adding outlandish paragraphs with little to no grammar, In the beginning of the book, I was thrown off by these sections but always caught up, realized their meaning and appreciated the style, By the end of the book, I honestly had no idea what they meant, Usually I like originality but these parts at the end felt like the author had had too much to drink before writing them, Let me preface this with this: I LOVE E, L. Doctorow. Loved sitelinkCity of God, Loved sitelinkRagtime. Loved sitelinkThe Book of Daniel, So, ok I didn't LOVE sitelinkHomer amp Langley, but at least I didn't finish the book thinking I had lost my facility to comprehend
English,
I wish I could tell you I know what this book is about, There's a conman/fugitive "protagonist" who is not at all likeable or even interestingly evil, There's a bizarre ladylove who dances in and out of selfrespect every chapter or so, The most interesting character is a maid, who disappears from the narrative fairly early on, The depressed and eccentric poet holds promise, yet he also vanishes,
I get that this was an experiment, There are moments of that great Doctorow language that I treasure, But as a coherent book it fails, I totally understand that some people find this work a "stunning masterpiece" and "utterly compelling, " Variety is definitely the spice of life, and I am probably the dry saltine of literature here, but this one really did not do it for me.
The intrigue in this book really kept my attention, and the parallels to historical figures made it so Doctorowesque, As in City of God, he is playing with the stream of consciousness, which does get a bit laborious at times, It is still a fine read, I read this book during a week on a Maine lake that has several resident loons, In spite of its bucolic title, the book is a scathing commentary on freemarket capitalism and the complicated human motivations that hold us in its grip, There's a hallucinogenic quality to some of the passages that can make the story line and characters hard to keep hold of, but the craftsmanship suggests this was the author's intent.
The main character he creates is a sort of dark and perverted version of a classic American success story, poor boy makes good, that's reminiscent of Mann's Felix Krull and even more relevant for the times we're living in.
Doctorow is one of my all time favourite authors, Other than sitelinkCity of God I have throughly enjoyed everything he has written,
This was no exception, and for me at least, stands out as one of his very best,
Set in, it follows the crossed paths of a young vagabond and an older, and apparently failed poet, both of whom love a tormented beauty and both of whom wind up being taken care of by a famous tycoon.
The narrator, for most part, Joe Korzeniowski,years old when the novel begins, shakes off his working class background of the Great Depression in Paterson, New Jersey, his childhood, and even his surname, and heads for California as a hobo, but stops off to work as a carnival, befriending Fanny the Fat Lady, apound "retarded whore freak" who services hordes of men in feral orgies.
Fat and drunken poet, Warren Penfield was from Ludlow, Colorado, and had a bizarre heroism in the Great War, then spent years in a Japanese monastery, before arriving at automobile mogul, FW Bennett's Loon Lake estate in the Adirondacks.
In, the wandering Joe also arrives at Loon Lake having followed a beautiful woman riding a train carriage, He trespasses, is attacked by dogs, and wakes up in the care of the estate staff, For some reason, FW Bennett takes to him,
Among Bennetts entourage are an aviatrix third wife, the sodden poet Penfield, an industrial consultant or bodyguard, Thomas Crapo alias Tommy the Emperor and Crapos girl, Clara.
Joe is taken on as a servant, only to elope after a few months with Clara, On the run, he gets a job in one of Bennetts factories, There is a strike the strike is broken, as are some of Joes bones,
This may lack the historical propellant of some of Doctorows other work, sitelinkRagtime or sitelinkThe Book of Daniel for example, but it has the same assertion, that the tentacles of capitalism reach everywhere.
Joe is as exploited by Bennett and his people at Loon Lake as he was by his humble and labouring parents who he abandoned a cynical commentary on Roosevelts New Deal.
The novel has many brilliant parts, a series of dazzling solo performances which follow each other in rapid succession, If theres a quibble, its how they come together, But thats nitpicking. There is also the wonderful period detail that is a trademark of Doctorows work,
Heres a clip of Joe of Paterson on the hobo road as a boy, .
I made acquaintance of a maid she had an eye for me she like my innocent face, She was an older woman, some kind of Scandinavian wore hair in braids, She was no great shakes but she had her own room and late one night I was admitted and led up all the flights of this mansion and brought to a small bathroom top floor at the back.Loon Lake, a work of fiction, by E, L. Doctorow is set in the North Eastern part of the U, S. during the great depression. Joe the main character decides to journey in search of wealth and happiness during this dark and impoverished period of history, His travels bring him to a millionaire, which is quite unusual for anyone to be so rich and to the wealthy mans Catskill Mountains summer home, This is quite similar to his other book Worlds Fair with a change of perspective, in the former Joe is an adult and in the latter a child.
She sat me in a clawfoot tub and gave me a bath, this hefty hot steaming redfaced woman, I dont remember her name Hilda Bertha something like that, and she knows herself well before we make love she pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the noise she makes and it is really interesting to go at this great chunky energetic bigbellied softassed floptitted but headless woman, teasing it with a touch, watching it quiver, hearing its muffled squeaks, composing a fuck for it, the likes of which I like to imagine she has never known.
If you don't want an experimental great depression novel with multiple perspectives, stream of conscious madness and Zen koans hidden through out then don't read this book.
Your loss. Don't know what to say of this book, The reviews made me pick it up, but "aaaghhh", The writing is somewhat weird, and even if you get past that, the narration is confusing, Maybe I'm not made out to read this kind of book, but I'd read it again only if I have absolutely nothing to read, I would say Loon Lake is the best E, L. Doctorow novel I have read thus far I even hazard to say Loon Lake is the superior of Ragtime, Others have called it confusing, difficult, compromised by bad poetry, etc, but I found the outofchronological order and firstpersonnarrative jumping exciting, The use of verse to reprise the prose was a way of angling the story slightly differently so the reader can admire the way the light strikes it on different facets.
Doctorow's occasional decision to present the verse version ahead of the narrative version has the cinematic/musical effect of rushing the reader down a wormhole into the scene or leaping into a new verse on a backward cymbal hit.
This, along with the riveting streamofconsciousness vignettes, give Loon Lake a rhythmic quality unlikely to appear in a straightforward, linear story,
The streamofconsciousness segments are what truly make Loon Lake the success it is, In the past, I've had trouble with streamofconsciousness prose, chiefly because the authors themselves were too eccentric in their own consciousness and decided to imbue their subjects with the same inscrutability Joyce, Wolfe, Dos Passos.
Doctorow writes such accessible, plausible characters that their streams of consciousness are logical and feel like natural motions, like being masterfully led in a dance.
And I realize this sounds cheap and corny the fact that Loon Lake has a relatively but plausibly happy ending gives the book a clean finish.
The novel's horrific scenes make the reader apprehensive that Loon Lake will play out like a Coen Brothers movie of the Fargo, No Country for Old Men variety by the end.
Don't think of this as a spoiler consider it reassurance: Loon Lake is not a crushing despair, It's a great novel, one any Doctorow fan should seek out, Confusing. Jumping from character to character, person to person, prose to poetry, punctuation to no punctuation, There were moments where the writing was surprising that would keep me reading, and then, disappointment, What really drove me crazy was there wasn't one redeemable character not one person I would want to spend any time with not one that seemed human.
Just spentweeks in california
Sunk very deep and yet remained all the time skimming some dark greenblack surface
I feel strength when i think of my core and when i think of my dearest friends
Life continues on, the register keeps the score In the summer of, at the age of, Joe leaves Paterson, New Jersey with the vague notion of heading to California but detours to the Adirondack Mountains instead where he eventually stumbles onto the rustic estate of a wealthy automobile manufacturer.
Loon Lake is a tale of the haves and havenots set in the heartbreaking early years of labor unions,
Of the five or six incredibly remarkable Doctorow novels I have read, Loon Lake, published inbetween his awardwinning Ragtimeand awardwinning World's Fair, is the least satisfying and most puzzling.
The narrative is sometimes linear but often not some sentences are breathtakingly elegant but just when the reader begins to adjust to the lack of punctuation along comes a solitary comma, as if to prove that Doctorow's typewriter keys were not sticking when he wrote this book.
This depressionera tale takes place at a tycoon's hidden mountain estate, In an ironic twist of Horatio Alger, the poor hero, Joe Korzeniowski of Paterson, New Jersey, becomes Joseph Patterson Bennett, the rich man's adopted son and heir to Loon Lake.
A dangerous young street punk known only as Joe goes on the lam from the bluecollar world of Paterson, New Jersey, in, Protean in personality, Joe is hardly content with shoplifting, alley stabbings with his razorsharp penknife, robbing the poor box at church, or discovering sex with a Gramercy Park housemaid.
He knows he wants to be someone other than himself, but he cannot seem to find the final version of that other,
With each experience, Joe feels that "some silent secret presence grew out to the edges of me, " The adult world may be hollow and pretending and afraid, but merely seeing through it is not enough, Joe will not be tamed by the respectable world, but he also must find out what he is, and so Doctorow sends him out into the vast forests of the northern republic, where invisible energies guide him to his fateand to himself.
On the open road, Joe receives his real political education from hobo socialists in random Hoovervilles, and then he catches on with a carnival on its slow, sordid journey through the lost slaggray villages of the Adirondacks.
Joe has an affair with the owner's wife and then takes off by himself, In the depths of a midnight forest, he experiences a vision "of incandescent splendor," a private train car passing only a few yards from him and within it a beautiful naked blond girl trying on a dress.
Spellbound, Joe follows the tracks toward the major dramatic locus of the book, the thirtythousandacre hideaway of mysterious multimillionaire F, W. Bennett and the rest of the cast that surrounds him, including the kept poet Warren Penfield, the kept woman Clara Lukacs, the kept gangster Tommy Crapo, and, ultimately, the solution to the riddle of Joe's identity.
.