341 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 2011
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian …
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale.
We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house--and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang--who thrived and who faltered--and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both--and escape the merciless progress of time--in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. From the Hardcover edition.
Hay que leer con mucho cuidado. Poner mucha atención a los nombres y la época temporal de cada capítulo.
Una delicia literaria, pasan tantas cosas, y las vidas que refleja son absolutamente plausibles pero muy interesantes.
This book had me on board just a couple of chapters in, knowing it wasn't the kind of book that was going to end in any conventional way. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character who recur only as side characters in the other chapters. It's as though every character is a mysterious talisman with obscure powers as viewed by all the others. Through all the chapters the passage of time, lurching from distant past to barely recognizable future, makes its inexorable mark magnifying some events while fading others so that only one person can half remember them. Reviews talk about the slide deck chapter, but that is just one more chunk of artifice, differing from the other chapters only in degree. There have been other novels with interlocking sets of characters and told from different viewpoints but this one is done in a …
This book had me on board just a couple of chapters in, knowing it wasn't the kind of book that was going to end in any conventional way. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character who recur only as side characters in the other chapters. It's as though every character is a mysterious talisman with obscure powers as viewed by all the others. Through all the chapters the passage of time, lurching from distant past to barely recognizable future, makes its inexorable mark magnifying some events while fading others so that only one person can half remember them. Reviews talk about the slide deck chapter, but that is just one more chunk of artifice, differing from the other chapters only in degree. There have been other novels with interlocking sets of characters and told from different viewpoints but this one is done in a brilliant fashion so that you feel as though each narrator is being given a spotlight on their interior life, not necessarily in the chapter which was being told from their own viewpoint. It reminded me of the book [b:The Making of Incarnation|57005202|The Making of Incarnation|Tom McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1620080163l/57005202.SX50.jpg|87729884] which I took in not long ago, but the pace never dragged to the extent that book did.
A lot of what happens along the course of this book is there to make you cringe. You see the bad thing about to happen, you feel it when it hits, and you learn the consequences of it right away and sometimes long after. I'm not sure how the author managed to keep everything straight when drafting this novel. Things happen all over the place over the span of decade, people change radically from one appearance to the next, and some mysteries are never solved. It could easily have fallen apart into an accumulation of pointless anecdotes, but somehow there are connections that tie things together so you feel like there are always stakes.
The narrator of this audiobook did a great job bringing out the differences between all the characters, during different stages in their lives. I'm looking forward to reading the author's book that came out last year.
This started to lose me in some of the middle chapters, but it came back with a strong finish. Connected stories: some were compelling, others were clunkers. Some of the plot lines were pretty ridiculous (the general, the fake boyfriend) and/or annoying (I really disliked chapter 9). Some of the style/format choices were interesting (e.g., second-person narration in chapter 10). I think the PowerPoint presentation was my favorite chapter, although the final chapter was great also.
