The End of the 19th Century

by Eric Larsen

Larsen stretches conventional fiction's reach with this story of a character whose childhood and coming-of-age consist of his gradual internalizing of his coming to understand "the mysteries of space... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0982987846
• ISBN13: 9780982987841
• Release Date: December 2011
• Publisher: Oliver Arts and Open Press
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Book Alive

Eric Larsen is a master celebrating the peak of his powers. The End of the 19th Century soars on the wings of Larsen's effortlessly evocative writing with a grace that epitomizes finest literature. One of those rare books that actually breathes, has a pulse, remembers.... Absolutely highest recommendation.

Very much recommended reading for literary fiction fans

A lot can change over a hundred and fifty years. "The End of the 19th Century" is the third novel in the tetraology called 'An American Memory' covering a Midwestern family over one hundred and fifty years of their existence. Focusing on the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, author Eric Larsen draws pictures of changing times for the Reiner family." The End of the 19th Century" is very much recommended reading for literary fiction fans.

The Ontological Imagination of Eric Larsen

A NOTE ON ERIC LARSEN'S THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY: THE ONTOLOGICAL IMAGINATION RESURRECTS REALISM FROM THE REALMS OF THE DEAD by GREGORY MARSZAL Eric Larsen's third novel is marvelous. I don't know how I can say it more simply: I love the book. Like I Am Zoë Handke (1992), it has all the fundamental characteristics that draw me into a book of fiction. I was completely in its universe when I was reading it; I wanted to return to that universe when I was not reading it; and the universe generated by the work lingered and haunted my seeing after I completed reading it. Again, what struck me first was the writer's profound mix of clarity with poetic evocation. How does Larsen do that? I assume that it is not only a matter of art, or technique, but that it is the expression of an existential accomplishment, or a way of life. As I moved through the events of the book, there was never any doubt that I was inside reality; that the materiality of things--their densities and their textures--was always present, but at the same time the question of their ultimate values, or of their potential significance, reverberated with depth and possibility. Isn't this the opposite of the hubris found in the bland "realism" we drown in today? That conventional kind of realism believes that somehow it has arrived at the very origin of things, at the one true and fundamental reality of what is. There are many reasons for this, and I'm sure that Eric Larsen is aware of all of them. I'm sure also that he is more intensely aware than most people of how we live now in a world aesthetically both alienating and void--so much so that language itself is drained of its potential for seeking depth, newness, or originality either in thought or emotion. All the "market-driven" oceans of work put out by publishers prides itself that by means of its unquestioning "realism," it has arrived at the very origin of things, at (as I said before) the one true and fundamental reality of what is. This smug attitude is so pervasive, so deeply entrenched, as to have grown nearly totalitarian in its omnipresence and fake authority. One of the essential things that I have learned in my own efforts as a writer of poetry is that the poetic consciousness is generative of value. And that's why Larsen's books live the way they do. He doesn't appeal to any transcendent, any other-worldly value system, to underpin his own purposes, values, or aims. The boy in The End of the 19th Century experiences the very genesis of meanings, not the imposing of them. In Larsen, as in other writers who knew this same truth about the relation between writing and existing--writers as seemingly unalike as Whitman and Joyce--you become aware, as does the character in Larsen's novel, that Being is infinite, and, as such, is capable of being refracted and viewed from innumerable points, and is even then not fully known. Furthermore, each of these points isn't simply a geometric location in time and space, but

A Brief Mystery of TIME

This book is a profound analysis of TIME as we know it from within and perceive it from without. At the end of the 19th century/early 20th, artists such as Lewis Carroll, Duchamp, Picasso, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, etc. etc. were all captivated by 19th century physics and the Fourth Dimension (Alice's "looking glass" is a work-hole; Carrol was, after all, a mathematician), then further intrigued by Einstein's discovery that the Fourth Dimension was Time itself. Larsen, from the vantage of 21st century knowledge, attempts to capture BOTH the brief point in time that was the end of the 19th century, before the mass-culture, turmoil and techo-doo-dads of the 20th century distracted us from our own perceptions of "reality," and the artifice to allow readers the "illusion" of Time's passing within the structure of the book. But he also goes further. As a literary stylist of the first order, he writes in the "language of time" to describe lost time. That is, his form follows it's function. Knowing the past as the past, something known and recalled but intangible is the "subject" of this wonderful book, and Larsen's description of time's seeping, using not the elegant calculations of physics, but the the equally elegant sentences of the writer, as its method of inquiry. This book is a "trip," in every sense of the term, and a profound exercise in the "lost" arts of deep memory, thinking and all-around mind-bending. Chapeau!