Angelica's Grotto

by Russell Hoban

Book Overview

Altogether original, at once searing and amusing, this darkly comic novel confronts Harold Klein, now in his infirm seventies, with a strange malady -- the loss of his "inner voice" -- and introduces... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786708786
• ISBN13: 9780786708789
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Please god, let this be the start of the Hoban Renaissance.

My girlfriend is a Berlinerin, and while visiting her a couple months ago, taking the S-Bahn to her college, we passed a typically cryptic graffiti scrawl -- even the hoodlums in Germany fancy themselves Nietzsches -- that said "There are 20 great men in the world today, and we are here to help them." It's a sign of either my prescience or psychosis that I immediately thought of... well, myself, but that's the typical reaction. Right afterwards I thought of a much more deserving candidate for a member of this illustrious, if somewhat arbitrary 20; Russell Hoban, author of the book you're reading about here and, this is not an opinion, one of the most important writers alive. The irony is that there is no one on earth who has gotten less "help" with his project, his career, his LIFE than Hoban -- after scoring a cult success with Riddley Walker in 1981, he had the unforgivable audacity to better it with Pilgermann, my candidate for the greatest novel of the second half of the 20th century, a visionary and bottomlessly complex work that put him in the rarefied company of Kleist, Kafka and Borges... and which was promptly rejected, along with its creator, as if Hoban were the literary equivalent of Right Said Fred. People just did not want to go beyond Riddley. As it turns out, we couldn't have helped Hoban more than by ignoring him -- like Proust's composer Vinteuil, Hoban has lived and worked in relative limbo, admired by fellow novelists but ignored by the ox populi, having nothing to guide him but his own instincts. "I have been denied my rightful martyrdom," complained George Bernhard Shaw in a preface, knowing full well his new play, like all the others, would be a thumping success. Hoban, however, has suffered multiple martyrdoms, almost every time he's put out a book -- this is the first of his books to even be PUBLISHED in America since Pilgermann in 1983! -- and here we see him reaping the benefits of a lifetime of bitterness, loss and unjustified neglect. What possible benefits could there be from such a horrid fate? Well, what other 75-year old could have written a book as immediate and personal, possibly even as era-defining, as The Catcher in the Rye? The central character of Angelica's Grotto, Harold Klein, could almost be a geriatric Holden Caulfield, if he weren't so distinctly Hobanian -- an adjective that will come to mean "wistful, yet cranky, and apt to make random connections between everyday life and myth, B-movies and obscure paintings." The book works because Klein is also, to put none too fine a point upon it, Hoban himself. He makes sport of his angina, his impotence, his irrelevance, but every stunning sentence, every radiant description of London and exhibition of puppyish sexual curiosity, belies his self-loathing and reveals he has the heart of a much younger man -- or a child. Hence the heartbreak of growing old, and of this book. The plot, Hoban's most clever and subtle variation yet on the Orpheus my

hoban's head is dreaming us

Fantastic, moving novel, from Hoban's increasingly fertile and prolific late period. You've read what it's about. Like all Hoban's novels, this is concerned with the relationship between reality and fantasy; and as with all his best (Riddley Walker, Turtle Diary, and the new one, Amaryllis Night and Day), the difference between these is rendered uncertain. Hoban's writing represents a gritty, everyday, totally honest species of Magic Realism which leaves out glamour and sfx to suggest that the way we all behave is deeply and inevitably conditioned by our fears, histories, hopes, dreams and desires; and ultimately that these get the upper hand over some objective idea of what the real world is or some standard of correct behaviour. Thus, 72-year-old Klein experiences a latelife Yeatsian erotic upsurge which leads him to do all sorts of weird, dangerous, and entertaining things beyond his own immediate comprehension. These things are logical and inevitable, like the mad things we all do are. Klein is a great character: old, cranky, bright, experimental, on-the-case, natural, honest - and lonely; Hoban's best creation since Riddley. The book has wise and empowering things to say about the importance of the internal in public life - as well as the challenges and dangers of trying to honour it. Plus, it is an extremely funny and constantly engaging insight into what it's like to be old but deeply clued-in, contemporary, and not yet sexually dormant. I hope I end up like Klein (but you can spare me the weird stuff). High art delivered in an easy package, Angelica's Grotto is a resonant, unforgettable, wise novel written in beautiful, spare, epigrammatic prose with great humour and concision. You can start and finish it on a local flight. Buy.

Steamy Hoban-Antics!

Vastly enjoyable for the linguistic acrobatics as for the sarcastic viewpoint of the central character, Klein. I found myself giggling particularly at his old-man impatience with others, including his comic psychiatrist, further humour value coming from outbursts worthy of a sufferer of Turet's Syndrome. And yet it is a very clever novel. As a reader, you travel with him as he becomes embroiled in a tale of his own dangerous indulgence and insiduously become an unwitting voyeur...