- Paperback: 217 pages
- Publisher: Graywolf Press (Jan 26 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1555974384
- ISBN-13: 978-1555974381
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 13.5 x 1.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,697,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Experimental poet and novelist Braverman (The Incantation of Frida K.) proffers a brash, witty memoir comprising a dozen bubbling, occasionally repetitive essays chronicling her 1990s move from L.A. to an upstate New York farmhouse. After the last spate of riots and a major earthquake, the 40-something Braverman decides to quit the city of her birth and head to the Allegheny Mountains to live through brutal winters with her husband, an academic scientist, and teenage daughter. In the first and funniest essay, Braverman relates how a longtime denizen of L.A. like herself manages to leave, an ordeal in itself: "Such a departure requires magical intervention." Then she is prey to advice from others, such as Uncle Irving, who gives the lowdown on their Jewish family's desperate emigration from the Old World: "They couldn't even invent a past with a single exception to impoverishment." In six "Transmission" essays, Braverman delineates her thorny new eastern habitat, where she enjoys four bathrooms, gardening and "active correspondence necessitating pens and the postal service"; with snow falling for eight consecutive months, she even craves the crass fantasyland of L.A. malls. In fact, once removed from that city's crime and materialism, Braverman finds she can draw in sharp relief its "accumulated atrocities." (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"[Braverman's] talent, uncorked, is as bold and brave and beautiful as anything we see from writers of her generation." --Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Braverman's New World, Jan 16 2006
By Ted Burke "Ted Burke" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Paperback)
I lucked out two months back and acquired an uncorrected proof of "Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles", and even though I was fairly familiar with her novels (especially the dreamy and harshly poetic re-imagination of Frida Kahlo in "Incantations of Frida K"), this nominal memoir of the place knocked me out, tied me up and left me pained and pleasured in ways only the best writing can manage. As with the best writing by Don DeLillo, she does a potently condensed job of assessing, summarizing and characterizing the shapeless sprawl that constitutes the City of Angels. Addressing herself often times in collective pronouns such as "you" and "we", she taps into what might be the dry , metaphysical desolation that inhabits theisolated communities, the neighborhoods abutting train tracks and the eroded processing plants, whole square miles of battlefield playgrounds and strip malls.
Her writing is electric, brilliant, an ongoing metaphorical chain that unfolds like a rich, spiraling improvisations. Like DeLillo, and especially Norman Mailer in his glorious accounting of the architectural grandness and contradictions of odd American urban centers in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", Braverman compares and contrasts and confronts the difficulty of defining an identity as an artist and person with a purpose within the the crushing isolation and rootlessness that is Los Angeles' sadly exclusive domain.
Part essay, memoir, gilded satire and ecstatic tone poem, "Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angles" is the most riveting non-fiction I've read in years, and it is an unqualified joy for the lover of masterful prose writing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
AMAZING WRITING, Jun 21 2010
By Our Gr8 USA "I love the USA" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Paperback)
You will not be able to stop reading this book. It is fascinating! Both good fascinating and ugly fascinating like a car wreck. The beauty captured in words about the her first winter in New York is dead-on. I know because I live there and that's exactly how beautiful upstate New York is during the cold, gray months. She captured the beauty of the snow on the trees and as well as the ugliness of living in L.A. slums. You just can't put the book down! It's amazing. The writing is even better than the story. Lyrical and delightful!A great read!
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