Andrew's Brain: A Novel [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00H860UCC | Format: PDF, EPUB
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This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times - funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew?s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history."
Books with free ebook downloads available Andrew's Brain: A Novel [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Epub Free
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 3 hours and 52 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: January 14, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00H860UCC
Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion? "
In his book The joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten describes the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Both types of people suffer from chronic bad luck of one sort or another. The difference is that while the schlemiel is the type of person that trips while carrying a tray of soup in the cafeteria, the schlimazel is the person it lands on. In E.L. Doctorow's compelling new novel, Andrew's Brain, the protagonist Andrew is the schlemiel whilst all those closest to him end up being schlimazels.
Although not technically a mystery this book is one which can easily be spoiled by too full a description of the narrative. So I will start with some broad brush strokes and leave the rest to be discovered by the reader.
Andrew is talented and smart; he is a cognitive scientist with multiple degrees. His life, if his interior monologue is to be believed, has been dogged by a series of unfortunate events. Those events have left him physically unharmed. The physical harm involved has always struck those closest to him. The story is told mostly through the voice of Andrew's interior monologue and in snippets of conversation with another person, perhaps a psychiatrist or some other person tasked with getting Andrew's story told.
But the lack of physical harm is no indicator that Andrew has not been damaged and it appeared clear to me from the start that Andrew's monologue was really getting to the edges of his role in these events.
A few pages into this new Doctorow novel, I was reminded of one of his regular narrative strategies--that is, he often begins his novels by creating confusion in the reader's mind. The narrator's voice shifts, the chronology is confusing or just random, the location of the action (or discussion) is unclear, and so on. The characteristics of narrative that give the reader a sense of where and who and what and why are scrambled. It takes a while for the attentive reader to sort them out. This happens at the beginning of Andrew's Brain, but it's not a longterm problem with the novel. As it happens, the reader soon learns that the voice of Andrew is speaking to (or in some cases writing to) his analyst, an unnamed presence who responds with questions (often left unanswered) and occasional comments about Andrew's state of mind, motives, good or bad choices. Andrew tells the analyst about the failure of his first marriage and his panicky effort to have his first (now former) wife take over the care of his infant daughter by his second wife, who is deceased. We learn all this if we read attentively through the first sections of the novel. I would add that there are no spoilers here.
With reference to spoilers, I have to say that I hesitate to tell much of anything more about the events Andrew narrates to his analyst, other than that he tells the story of how he meets and marries his second wife. Beyond that, it would be unfair to reveal the sequence of events that form the main body of the narrative of this uneven but finally very powerful novel. (I started early thinking it might be a 2 star, as I was exasperated by the triviality of much of Andrew's narrative and the too-clever devices Doctorow was using to mix the chronology and the characters to sustain uncertainty and suspense.
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