Warehouse Stock Clearance Sale

Grab a bargain today!


Weinstock Among the Dying
By

Rating

Product Description
Product Details

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal holds the Darden Distinguished Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He is author of Dusty Angel (BOA, 1999), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as four other poetry books, one novel, one memoir, an essay collection, and translations of poems by Peter Kantor. Publications include The New Yorker, and Paris Review.

Reviews

Poet Blumenthal's morbidly funny though often contrived first novel is the angst-laden story of poet Martin Weinstock, a mournful Lothario appointed to Thanatos U. (read: Harvard)--a place, he says, where ``death is a mere formality.'' Traded as a baby by his poor, immigrant parents to a childless, ailing aunt and uncle in exchange for a New Jersey chicken farm, Weinstock notes that ``womb'' rhymes with ``tomb'' and rates himself ``among the dying'' since infancy. At Thanatos, he and his colleagues carp and whine like Woody Allen and Billy Crystal, trading one-liners about tenure, the ``dead'' literary canon, department death notices (which he feels are redundant), and the ``frauds'' on the faculty. Weinstock has numerous ill-fated affairs, one ending with a student's abortion, and it seems no accident that a woman named Beatrice leads him from his sex-and-death wilderness to a salvation of sorts. Uneven, but worth a look for large collections.-- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio

To poet Martin Weinstock, disgruntled lecturer at Harvard, the Ivy League school is a deadly place, rife with faculty suicides yet smug with an insular narrowness of vision. Blumenthal's graceful, wise, moving first novel begins as a savage, hilarious satire of academia and the literary world, then plunges into Weinstock's painstaking self-analysis, a process that sometimes becomes tedious. Weinstock, who flits joylessly from one lover to the next in comedic erotic scenes reminiscent of Philip Roth, seethes with anger and self-pity. As he recalls growing up in Manhattan, we learn that he was adopted shortly after birth by his aunt and uncle, uneducated German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Weinstock discovered that his adoptive mother was really his aunt only after she died of cancer when he was ten. Through psychoanalysis, he finally comes to terms with his suppressed grief over her death, and by the book's end he confronts the legacy of his biological parents, learns to accept his feelings and becomes a father. Blumenthal, a poet and former creative writing director at Harvard, has written an engrossing narrative: death-obsessed, life-affirming and, like all good novels, resonant with meaning. (Sept.)

Ask a Question About this Product More...
 
Look for similar items by category
People also searched for
Item ships from and is sold by Fishpond.com, Inc.

Back to top