Friday, May 06, 2005
If you didn't read "Fredy Neptune" when it first came out, go find a copy.
I have been running around doing errands today, so I'm cheating by using an old book review (a brief) I wrote of one of my favorite books, back when I used to read for a living.....
Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), hardcover, $27.50
My house is small, so I give away most of these review copies after I finish them. This one's a keeper. Murray's narrative poetry is easier to read than most prose, and certainly moves faster. The form serves as shorthand for what could have been a long, unwieldy saga in prose. Trimmed of the unnecessary baggage of setting and explanation, it's a fictional piece of oral history. A poet constructs sentences and phrases according to speech patterns and lyrical rhythms, and that's exactly how this book is written.
The story runs from a little before the beginning of World War I to a little after the end of World War II. The narrator is Fred Boettcher, a hyphenated Australian whose childhood language is German. As if being a German-speaking subject of the British crown isn't complicated enough, Fred develops leprosy while roaming the Eastern Mediterranean and eventually loses tactile sensation throughout his body. With the numbness comes phenomenal strength; our hero reckons it's because he can't feel the strain on his muscles.
Fred (a.k.a. Friedrich, F.W. Beecher, and Fredy Neptune the strongman, among others) may be numb, but he has feelings. He encounters some of the most horrifying events of this century and manages to be present for some of the best-known. Always trying to return to his family in Australia, he sails all seven seas, appears as an extra in Hollywood movies, and rescues a retarded teenager from castration in Hitler's Germany. And that's before breakfast.
Physically, he is largely uninjured by the violence that surrounds him, but he remembers everything and takes it all very much to heart. He goes everywhere and does everything, but rarely in first class. Instead, he finds out what trench warfare is like for the soldier at the bottom, what riding the rails is like for a starving hobo, and what welfare is like for the landless. He handles his forays into society with irony and his frequent descents with humor.
Get over your fear of long poems. Read this.
Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), hardcover, $27.50
My house is small, so I give away most of these review copies after I finish them. This one's a keeper. Murray's narrative poetry is easier to read than most prose, and certainly moves faster. The form serves as shorthand for what could have been a long, unwieldy saga in prose. Trimmed of the unnecessary baggage of setting and explanation, it's a fictional piece of oral history. A poet constructs sentences and phrases according to speech patterns and lyrical rhythms, and that's exactly how this book is written.
The story runs from a little before the beginning of World War I to a little after the end of World War II. The narrator is Fred Boettcher, a hyphenated Australian whose childhood language is German. As if being a German-speaking subject of the British crown isn't complicated enough, Fred develops leprosy while roaming the Eastern Mediterranean and eventually loses tactile sensation throughout his body. With the numbness comes phenomenal strength; our hero reckons it's because he can't feel the strain on his muscles.
Fred (a.k.a. Friedrich, F.W. Beecher, and Fredy Neptune the strongman, among others) may be numb, but he has feelings. He encounters some of the most horrifying events of this century and manages to be present for some of the best-known. Always trying to return to his family in Australia, he sails all seven seas, appears as an extra in Hollywood movies, and rescues a retarded teenager from castration in Hitler's Germany. And that's before breakfast.
Physically, he is largely uninjured by the violence that surrounds him, but he remembers everything and takes it all very much to heart. He goes everywhere and does everything, but rarely in first class. Instead, he finds out what trench warfare is like for the soldier at the bottom, what riding the rails is like for a starving hobo, and what welfare is like for the landless. He handles his forays into society with irony and his frequent descents with humor.
Get over your fear of long poems. Read this.
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Oldie but goodie indeed. And poems. Yes. It is scary to see that something is a poem. Arent we funny that way? The problem is that a good review doesnt mean you can find the book anywhere. Where is Fredy Neptune - besides inside your house - available? The whole thing of weird behavior being not acceptable. Who says its weird? Who is who?
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