Rachel Kushner
Teoksen The Flamethrowers tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Rachel Kushner's debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her second novel, The Flamethrowers, was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Her fiction and essays have näytä lisää appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, and Grand Street. She made the Bestseller List in 2018 with her title, The Mars Room. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Image credit: Littoral
Tekijän teokset
Associated Works
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Kanoninen nimi
- Kushner, Rachel
- Syntymäaika
- 1968-10-07
- Sukupuoli
- female
- Kansalaisuus
- USA
- Syntymäpaikka
- Eugene, Oregon, USA
- Asuinpaikat
- Eugene, Oregon, USA
Los Angeles, California, USA
San Francisco, California, USA - Koulutus
- University of California, Berkeley (BA)
Columbia University (MFA) - Ammatit
- journalist
novelist
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Listat
Booker Prize (1)
Crime (1)
Palkinnot
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Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 18
- Also by
- 7
- Jäseniä
- 4,102
- Suosituimmuussija
- #6,131
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.7
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 200
- ISBN:t
- 123
- Kielet
- 12
- Kuinka monen suosikki
- 5
The book opens with two motorcycle rides decades and continents apart. Valera is part of an Italian motorcycle unit during WWI when he kills a German soldier with a motorcycle headlight. Decades later he will go on to form the Valera motorcycle and tyre company. Decades the novel's main character Reno, 23 years old and weirdly guileless, rides a Moto Valera motorcycle through her home state of Nevada.
Reno's moves to a listless New York in the late 1970s in the hope of turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into successful art career. There she finds prostitutes, drunks, and "Sorry, no credit" signs in the bars but her arrival also coincides with an explosion of artistic activity as artists begin to colonise the old deserted industrial areas of the city. Reno soon finds herself drawn in to a world of poseurs, dreamers and raconteurs, and becomes the lover of a successful artist who is also the estranged youngest Valera son. Reno is invited to visit Italy and the Valera factory but when she travels to the country with her lover she finds herself embroiled in bitter familial disputes, worker strikes and radicals linked with the Red Brigade. Unfortunately she later returns to New York.
This novel is a first-person narrative with minimal plot interspersed with a few third-person documentary-style chapters about Valera, founder of the Moto Valera company, that fail to really lift the whole. The most successfully section takes place in Italy, in particular at the family home of Reno's aristocratic boyfriend, Sandro. Here, Kushner portrays the rich with a sort of cruel delight. Unfortunately she later returns to New York and its poseurs.
'The Flamethrowers' is thematically ambitious. Kushner attempts to link early- and late-20th-century movements in art and political activism but fails to really achieve it. The novel starts well but sadly drifts in the middle and she fails to really pull it back afterwards. Maybe the book would have been better if it had been given a third-person narrative but in the end I found none of the characters particularly engaging and along with most modern art I found them pretentious and facile. I didn't hate this book but it didn't really interest me either.… (lisätietoja)