Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
The protagonist of this novel, twice exiled, first from his birthplace, Budapest, Hungary, and then from the United States as a Vietnam draft resistor who settles in Montreal, becomes obsessed with a poem by W.H. Auden and a painting by the Dutch master, Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, an allegory about the nature of suffering that leads to his attempted suicide, the subsequent chaos of his life, and to his ultimate redemption. Set primarily in Montreal, the novel also travels to the places of the protagonist's past: the Europe of his childhood, the America of his adolescence, and the Montreal of his early adulthood through his memories and reflections. Despite its tragic-comic undertone, the novel profoundly explores the illusions we construct to provide value to our lives, the nature of love and the erotic, and the path towards compassion and meaning. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a subtly-crafted work, incorporating literary references, told in a fast-paced, engaging style. Alapi, known for his work on the writers of the New Underground as an editor and critic, presents a provocative edginess to his writing when it comes to sexuality and his lampooning of many of the sacred cows of our societal mores. As the British novelist Tony O'Neill wrote about his work: 'Alapi has a unique gift and it's one that most writers would kill to possess: he can move effortlessly from the poetic to the erotic, from the gritty to the heartbreaking, often in the space of a single paragraph.'
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