Afbeelding auteur

Frederick Reuss

Auteur van Horace Afoot

6 Werken 307 Leden 17 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Frederick Reuss lives in Washington, D.C. (Bowker Author Biography)

Bevat de naam: Frederick Reuss

Werken van Frederick Reuss

Horace Afoot (1997) 101 exemplaren
A Geography of Secrets (2010) 67 exemplaren
Henry of Atlantic City: A Novel (1999) 53 exemplaren
The Wasties: A Novel (2002) 46 exemplaren
Mohr: A Novel (2006) 38 exemplaren
Maisie at 8000 Feet (2016) 2 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
USA
Woonplaatsen
Washington, D.C., USA

Leden

Besprekingen

I have to say that I found this book to be a little different. It is good, but it is not blow you away astounding. It slowly meanders and there is not much of a plot, however you get to know the characters in the novel very well as they each tell their end of the story. It is sad and sweet and a little bit heartbreaking. There is love and loss and melancholy. The author wrote this story from photos of the family and many are included in the novel. I found them interesting. I think that this is well written and an easy read. The story is revealed through Max and Kathe’s letters to each other. It is similar to a diary of events. I give this one a 3 out of 5.… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
Pattymclpn | 1 andere bespreking | May 3, 2015 |
I'm surprised I finished this--it's an introspective novel, of the type that usually gets boring listening to another person's thoughts, but there's enough going on in Horace's life that I become curious about how he became such a loner.
Horace is so careful with his use of words that his use of "autism" nags at me--could there be a previous definition, preferrably used by ancient Greeks or Romans? Not that I can find. Is this a subtle hint that Horace is a high-functioning autistic? He has a number of idiosyncratic characteristics: he's a loner, with no clue as to human motivations, has a vast store of memorized texts, often in the original Latin, and a hatred of internal combustion engines. But if he's being scripted as someone with Aspberger's, why isn't this used as a marketing ploy, given the current interest in autism? Perhaps because Reuss is not autistic, so the musings are only his imagination of how an autistic person would think...or perhaps because his point eventually is that Horace is as normal as any of us.
All of these ramblings ignore the subplot of a young punk's interest in Horace and the fate of the rape victim Horace aids (p. 30).
The jacket blurb calls the novel "brilliantly comic". The brilliant part is likely true, but the comedy is fairly subtle. For example, when the archaeologists are hampered in their dig because the site is a "grackle nesting ground" (p. 244) I'm not sure if the sheriff is being his usual asinine self or if the author is expecting us to know this is ridiculous. Or when Horace ponders over what to name his crow (234) while the neighbor kid bids it goodbye "Dracula" (p. 241).
There is quite a lot of alcohol consumed, which may explain the obsessive thoughts that go no where. Happily there are jumps of several months at some chapters, so the reader can get to the action without ploughing thru too many internal monologues.
This would be an excellent book for anyone of a philosophical bent, who attempts to find meaning in life and has an appreciation for the ancient philosophers. It would also be a good book for anyone who thinks life is absurd.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
juniperSun | Jul 22, 2013 |
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
Geography of Secrets

In 1963, John Le Carre narrated in one book a great spy and one fatal love story:
“The spy who came from the cold” was a symphony of places, small, squalid or grey; East Berlin check points, the Templehof airport, tawdry London strip clubs, Scheveningen and desolate Dutch dunes. These urban landscapes, more than Smiley’s people, Fiedler or Mundt, gave the reader an incomparably twisted Shakespearian atmosphere thick with mental cutlasses and poisoned intrigues, plots and counter plots by Montagues-like agents of the West drawn against the Capulets of the East. This was an era when wars were cold and heroes luckless. Leamas, a spy on the decline, and Liz, an idealist librarian, caught in between the poisonous hatred of rival ideologies.
Their planted love became though so real that death united them in a Romean and Juliettesque final love scene for which a wicked prop man had replaced Verona’s balcony with the Berlin Wall, complete with ladder, watchtowers, sentries and projectors.

48 years later arrives a new type of novel, beautifully published by Unbridled Book, which fits our new age of G0. An age in which Power is more defined anonymously by the corridors of countless Washingtonian beltlined bureaucracies “where one merely holds a place until one takes over and changes come in the form of Allied Van Lines”.
In spite of their bombastic and daunting acronyms, these agencies are nothing more than suites of offices where Noel, one of the two Characters of this novel is a classified pawn. Noel’s drone hits a school by mistake...in Pakistan and that brings Noel between his priest, his golf clubs and his conscience. Needless to say, the reader is somewhat puzzled by Noel, the pure product of GO where not one country can claim moral supremacy and omelets are made globally breaking more and more eggs.

In a parallel narrative, another character, "the narrator" or Noel’s other face if he were Janus, explores the past Byronic streaks of his father through witnesses of his past around the world.

Each of these links to his father unveils this past to you, the reader, from Ethiopia during the fall of the Negus or during the early part of the Vietnam war as described by Graham Greene in “The Quiet American” and then later during post-Tet. These conversations give the best moments of this novel as the reader is given the latitude and longitude of each of these encounters and like the user of maps, the reader "fills the empty spaces between the lines of this book, with his own imagined presence." Perhaps will you also like”A Geography of Secrets” by Frederick Reuss and by reading it, gain admittance to its “impervious realm of complex hierarchies and obscure grammars.” The prose is beautiful and it is almost a succession of moments in a spy life, one of the past, one of the present.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
Artymedon | 13 andere besprekingen | May 15, 2011 |
Two men with different stories. But both trying to make sense of secrets in their lives. One in the dark past, the second erupting in the present. One family related, the second work related. For a long time it seems there is nothing to tie these stories together. I wondered half way through the book how their lives might weave together.

Finally came to the conclusion that the tie was their respective world views shaped heavily by their shared profession. As cartographers they both like to literally “map out” any problem they face in their minds until they can metaphorically wrap their arms around it and understand it on their terms. They do this quite well in the external world of concrete things and processes, but decidedly less well the world of people and emotion. As one character finally realizes:

“He knows his precise location as he crosses the fourteenth street bridge, where he is in relation to the [Washington DC] monuments, the city grid, traffic patterns, the federal bureaucracy, election cycles, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, GWOT – all the big structures. It is reassuring to know his place [in the government] …he fits in just fine. It’s ordinary life he can’t connect to.”

Great psychological story and highly recommended for anyone who has worked in a job a bit too long and wonders what became of the person they once were; anyone who has recently lost a father and is trying to piece together what that means for their family; and for professional cartographers or those who insist on viewing all of the world through the lens of a map.
… (meer)
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Gemarkeerd
BookWallah | 13 andere besprekingen | Feb 22, 2011 |

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Statistieken

Werken
6
Leden
307
Populariteit
#76,700
Waardering
3.8
Besprekingen
17
ISBNs
15
Talen
1

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