Mount Terminus: A Novel Author: David Grand | Language: English | ISBN:
B00ERTVYUK | Format: EPUB
Mount Terminus: A Novel Description
David Grand's Mount Terminus is a dark, majestic novel about art, family, overwhelming love, and the birth of Los Angeles
After his mother’s death, young Bloom boards a train with his bereaved father, Jacob, to travel west across mountains and deserts to California: Mount Terminus, their new home at the desolate end of the world. There, in a villa built atop a rare desert spring, they live apart from society, supported by the income from Jacob’s invention, the Rosenbloom Loop, a piece of technology that has revolutionized the nascent art of filmmaking. There, Bloom grows up in the shadow of his father’s grief, with only a pair of servants, the house’s ghosts, and his own artistic muse for company.
But Jacob can’t forever protect his family from his past—the dramatic series of events that has taken him from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on New York City's Lower East Side and into the graces of beautiful twin girls, and finally to this fragile refuge in pre-Hollywood Los Angeles. And Bloom, now an eccentric dark genius, can’t live alone at the top of the mountain forever. Prodded by his newly discovered half brother, in every way his opposite, Bloom will have to come down to meet the world. Otherwise the orange farmers and the vaqueros, the speculators and the developers, the artists and the barons of the silver screen, will surely come up the mountain to meet him.
Triumphant and enthralling, Mount Terminus marks a magnificent return for David Grand; it’s the novel he was born to write.
- File Size: 998 KB
- Print Length: 385 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0374280886
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ERTVYUK
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,762 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
David Grand's Mount Terminus is an ultimate coming-of-age story; it also concerns itself with the coming-of-age of an artist: the protagonist, Bloom. Beyond the journeying, the discovering of self, Grand gracefully builds a dramatic and subtle interior and exterior world.
The serious business here is that Grand has written an essential origin story that builds like layers of limestone. His complicated characters grow into in a world that doesn't quite exist yet - pre-modern Los Angeles - and this central question of origin asserts itself as a universal and spiritual focus for his inhabitants.
Mount Terminus is a book that dives deep. What I like most is it's assured originality, it's surprising strangeness. I think there is much to be said, in our own modern age of disappearing attention spans and rapidly changing technology, about newness and how or why we should embrace change. We must and we are better off for it. Invention and modernity exist at the core of Bloom's California, and these are also the reasons to embrace this serious text. There is a lot to discover and love.
Grand's landscapes are culled from the hard earth of the American West and are just as beautifully written; the language is much like the landscapes he invents - familiar and packed with so much time, so much life. Through Bloom, Grand takes the time to name what he sees in the new world, the beginning of everything we take for granted.
Beyond the landscape are the technologies of early filmmaking: phasmatropes, kinetoscopes, zoetropes, and the glass telescope through which Bloom watches the world of Hollywood being built below him.
"Mount Terminus," by David Grand, is like no book I've ever read before. It's surreal, dark, enigmatic, outlandish, and most of all, extraordinarily dense. Yes, I have to emphasize that part, dense. Remember that. It is the single best word to describe this novel. In fact, it reads like an impenetrable onslaught of phantasmagorical literary imagery. The prose can be both artistically stunning and mind-numbing: some parts are like a stylized tragic postmodern opera; others are like a fanciful and delightful adult fairy tale; and still others reminded me of Haruki Murakami, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe all mixed together. And yes, there were times I shook my head and thought I'd slipped momentarily and crazily into some kind of literary steampunk world of anachronistic technologies.
Much of the time this book was more exhausting than enjoyable. I found it incredibly draining to cut through all that lush fantastical imagery to find and follow the threads of the plot within. However in the end, I was happy I read the book. I admit that I almost gave up on it many times. The imagery was so dense and constant that it actually made my brain ache. My mind protested being forced persistently to imagine so much outside its own experience. It felt battered and assaulted by a deluge of bizarre mental pictures. One can only take so much and then the mind goes numb. Perhaps had I read it slowly, savoring the eccentric intellectual and literary delights of every page, the book would have been more pleasing. However, if I'd read it at that pace, it would have taken many weeks to finish. I have a stack of books waiting to read and review. I did not have that type of time to spare. I wish I had.
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