The Astral

Zusatztext 77506078 Informationen zum Autor Kate Christensen   is the author of five previous novels, most recently Trouble . The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publica­tions, most recently the New York Times Book Review , Bookforum , Tin House , Elle , and Open City . She lives in New York City. Klappentext In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint! Brooklyn! rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk! his wife! Luz! and their two children: Karina! now a fervent freegan! and Hector! now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity! Harry is summarily kicked out! leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary! marital! and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception! Kate Christensen details Harry's floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz's arms-and back to his better self-in a novel that is funny! bittersweet! and terrifically moving. Leseprobe Chapter One Toxic water streamed with gold like the belly of a turning fish: sunset over Newtown Creek. Tattered pinkish-black clouds blew overhead in the March wind. The water below me rippled with tendons and cowlicks. Just across the brief waterway were the low mute banks of Hunters Point, church spire, low-slung old warehouses. An empty barge made its way down the creek toward the East River and the long glittering skyscrapery isle. I stood behind the chain-link fence the city had slapped up to keep the likes of me from jumping in. I was hungry and in need of a bath and a drink. At my back thronged the dark ghosts of Greenpoint, feeding silently off the underwater lake of spilled oil that lay under it all, the polyfluorocarbons from the industrial warehouses. I had named this place the End of the World years ago, when it was an even more polluted, hopeless wasteland, but it still fit. As I stood staring out through the webbing of fence, my mind cast itself through the rivulets of my own lost verse. I netted little flashes of lines and phrases I’d been reworking, “Held spellbound, your mollusk voice / Quietly swathing my cochlea / In tentacles of damask cloth” and “Slow-weathered verdigris of our once bronzed thighs,” but they sounded dead to me now. All I could really hear was Luz, Luz, Luz like the feeble pulsing signals of a dying heart. Heartache was a physical thing, a pain in my chest, a sort of recoiling tension with an ache like a bruise. There was a withheld quality to my breathing lately, as if I had been sucker punched and was waiting to get my wind back, but no wind came. I could remember whole published poems, but if these new, destroyed verses still existed in my brain, they fled from the webbing of my memory like darting schools of tiny fish, scooching away the instant before capture. I turned away from this butt end of waterfront warehouses and walked back the way I’d come, along Manhattan Avenue, past the flophouse where I lived now, bare mattresses piled in the front window. I passed junk shops full of old radios, used dolls, and cowboy shirts, Goldsholle and Garfinkel Inc., Mexican bodegas, liquor stores, the abandoned hulk of JK Restaurant Supply with its twisted metal grate, small markets with root vegetables in boxes along the sidewalk, butchers’ shops festooned with loops of kielbasy. I went through the intersection at Greenpoint Avenue, the dingy McDonald’s, defeated Starbucks, opposing Arab newsstands, and on to the old Associated Supermarket with its sexy Polish girls pouting at nothing as they rang up your groceries. The outdoor clock at the Smolenski Funeral Home was permanently stopped at 6:30, both hands pointing straight down to hel...

Report

Spectacular. . . . The Astral, artfully composed and emotionally tender, is evidence of true literary genius. The Miami Herald
  
Impossible to put down. . . . Harry Quirk, living up to his own name, is a gem. The Oregonian 
 
The Astral is a work of art, a prose poem, and a finely told tale. . . . [A] tender, aching marvel of a book. The Huffington Post
 
An ode to Brooklyn and broken marriages, endings and beginnings, and the spaces in between. The Boston Globe
 
Christensen has somehow again created a captivatingly believable male narrator. The Washington Post 
 
An object lesson on the current realist novel. . . . The Astral is structured as a journey a poet s trip through an interior and exterior landscape and Christensen manages each step with quiet deliberation. The New York Times Book Review
 
[Christensen s] characters ruminations on how the forces of love and deception work in tandem within a relationship are both searing and concise. . . . [She] is a forceful writer whose talent is all over the page. Her prose is visceral and poetic, like being bludgeoned with an exquisitely painted sledgehammer. She is a portrait artist, drawing in miniature, capturing the light within. San Francisco Chronicle
 
A tart, compassionate story of marriage gone wrong. O, The Oprah Magazine
 
[A] sharp perceptive novel. . . . Christensen s The Astral is provoking and at times profoundly moving. Associated Press
 
Ah, urban beauty: Christensen gets what s funny about it, and also what s disappointing. She s a mischievous writer with a keen eye and ear for comedy, one who sets up precarious scenarios and then lets her characters hash things out. The New York Observer
 
[This] novel, by turns funny sad, and wise, is glittering with insightful and lovely descriptions, and Harry is so far my favorite fictional character of 2011: he s complicated, stubborn, smart, foolish, vulnerable, and man oh man does he feel real. Edan Lepucki, The Millions
 
The tinder for this fire lies in moments most often small: Kate Christensen doesn t fan the flames so much as reveal the embers as they spring to life. . . . Christensen s prose is clean and her characters enthralling. . . . The novel is a wonderful investigation of the pitfalls that arise in even the longest of marriages The Denver Post
 
Harry Quirk . . . [is] an unexpectedly irresistible hero in this delicious social satire. People
 
The best exploration of a middle-aged man s psyche since Bellow, all the more brilliant for having been written by a woman. Shelf Awareness (starred)
 
Christensen is a gifted novelist who knows how to deliver the goods when it comes to ruefully funny, bittersweet character sketches. Christian Science Monitor
  
Christensen perfectly embodies the voice of a male poet in crisis, Harry Quirk. . . . Readers will be sucked into extremely realistic familial dramas while Christensen perfectly captures her Brooklyn backdrop from dive bars to hipsters drinking overpriced coffee in trendy cafes. BookPage
  
As always in Christensen s writing, like it or not, the gritty human truths she reveals apply to us all. . . . Christensen is formidable when it comes to psychological observation. What truly sets her writing apart, however, are the disturbing, touching, confounding discrepancies she articulates between inner experience and external behavior, the compassion she brings to bear in her analysis of the fraught, misguided ways in which people interact. The Brooklyn Rail

Product details

• Authors: Kate Christensen
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 12.06.2012
• EAN: 9780307473356
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47335-6
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature