- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Granta Books; New edition edition (Mar 1 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1862075034
- ISBN-13: 978-1862075030
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,067,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
'Sinclair is an authentic visionary. Only at the end of the book, however, do we realise we've also been in the power of a genuine wizard, someone capable of tracing patterns and designs only barely perceptible to most people and, more to the point, able to reveal them to us' Michael Moorcock
Book Description
Todd Sileen, a rage-driven cripple ekes out a living in a wasted East London borough. This is a comic and alarming epic about a city and a society shredded by random violence and uncontrollable compulsions.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
The Roebuck (where else?) was not Sileen's kind of boozer. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
The Roebuck (where else?) was not Sileen's kind of boozer. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Calyx Of Our Dreams, Oct 22 2009
By Daniel Myers - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Radon Daughters (Paperback)
What exactly this book is about I'm not at all sure that I have any plausible notion. One should certainly acquaint oneself with at least a smattering of the Whitechapel to Oxford to Cambridge geography and history before picking the book up. Also, it becomes necessary to come to know something of a (justifiably, to my mind) forgotten writer by the name of William Hope Hodgson. Further, the book is, in general, very challenging. If you aren't well-versed in many poets and writers and their most abstruse works, you will miss out on much that is of significance in this dark, meandering work.But, aside from these ambiguous prefatory remarks, the thing that grabs the reader is Sinclair's mastery of the English language. His striking poetic descriptions are worth the rest of the occult muddle. Here are a few of these lines and passages:
"Night air hit their shamed, flushed faces like a cerebral insult. Rumours of tyre smoke and wet leaves. The smells by which Sileen navigated, the stink peculiar to this locality: a shed of maggots bred for fishermen, badly cured leather, forgotten dead things left on the hook."
"Massive ironwork gates. An agitation of leaves: ovate, deltoid, elliptic. Promiscuously mingled..."
"The curse of winter sunlight illuminating silted tributaries and overgrown paths."
"...the rusty nape of evening light."
"Their back-up, Rhab Adman, was scanning a low sky; a millrace of iron clouds, proletarian smoke, bad script, warnings. The beauty of horror chilled him. Destitute buildings with insurance-mascara windows, bricked entrances. A shifty, local moon with acid-erased features."
"Willows to the waterline. Melancholy. A lost hour between dusk and darkness. Shadows of the advancing dead."
If Sinclair's robust, poetic use of the language doesn't strike you, then I really couldn't recommend this book. It's too full of quirkiness, Brit-slang, arcana of all sorts to be appealing to most readers. - I'm not surprised at all that I'm the first to review it. - But, for what it's worth, the following passage seems to encapsulate the book's wayward theme to me:
"We are the calyx of our dreams. But are they our own? In dread, we fall victim to random nightmares. Outfalls of melancholy. We fear to close our eyes."
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
