Bücher von Andrew Grof

In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades' bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence's Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud. According to the narrator's father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves, where what is true one moment is false the next, what once beautiful now hideous. Everything is both earthly serious and airy as life itself. Put another way, true survival consists in this: trust nothing and no one, yet love everything and everyone. This the narrator's father achieves to perfection. He is the perpetual student unbound by place and time, who learned the art of love from Sappho, war from Napoleon ("call me Boni") and climbed the steep scaffold with a refreshing drink for the hard-working Michelangelo. In his many incarnations (learned from Merlin no doubt), father's ongoing struggle is on behalf of the downtrodden and against the obscenely powerful. The history of the world itself is too short to fully contain such an individual, just as it was too short to enfold Cervantes' great Don.

Artists is a brilliant exploration of the world of art, past and present, and two of its contemporary practitioners. They are a father and son team, although 'team' is a misnomer, as the father is by far the more brilliant of the two, with an increasingly

This seamless work of lyrical intensity mimics both in tone and substance one of Bach's grand compositions. It centers around two friends who are reunited after years of separation through an accidental meeting in New York's Greenwich Village-a meeting which becomes the catalyst for the nearly nonstop tale of the life and death of the mother of one, a holocaust survivor recently dead of cancer in New York. In the telling of the tale, recent as well as distant events are uncompromisingly exposed and historical as well as interpersonal connections at times painfully, yet always lovingly revealed. This journey of words is not without considerable risk to both the teller and the listener who is eventually joined by his girlfriend with little or no historical perspective. "e;The Goldberg Variations"e; as played by Glenn Gould is a recurrent theme throughout the novel, as it is one of the few pieces of music comforting the mother as she nears her end. This novel is a moving portrait of the past as well as the present, and in its grand as well as small scale becomes a successful exploration of the myriad ups and downs of human relationships.

In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades’ bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence’s Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud. According to the narrator’s father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves, where what is true one moment is false the next, what once beautiful now hideous. Everything is both earthly serious and airy as life itself. Put another way, true survival consists in this: trust nothing and no one, yet love everything and everyone. This the narrator’s father achieves to perfection. He is the perpetual student unbound by place and time, who learned the art of love from Sappho, war from Napoleon (“call me Boni”) and climbed the steep scaffold with a refreshing drink for the hard working Michelangelo. In his many incarnations (learned from Merlin no doubt), father’s ongoing struggle is on behalf of the downtrodden and against the obscenely powerful. The history of the world itself is too short to fully contain such an individual, just as it was too short to enfold Cervantes’ great Don.

In this first-person account, a composer confronts cancer as well as an increasingly debilitating dementia that threatens to rob him of both his past and his present. In something of a last ditch effort he does his best to resurrect nearly forgotten loves as well as the music of the greats that once sustained him. In the process he finds the past no less difficult to deal with than his present and is forced to confront a most unflattering image of himself. The crisp yet lyrical writing is crisp yet lyrical and alternates between staccato and legato depending on the particular stages of the composer''s illness. The Hamlet-like narrator is at once dangerously close and forbiddingly distant from the reader with a climax in death''s full assault with hitherto hidden revelations. * * * Andrew Grof is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, both published by Sunstone Press: The Goldberg Variations (also translated and published by Argumentum Press in Hungary in 2014), and Everyone Loves Ronald McDonald. He currently resides in Miami, Florida after retiring from Florida International University as university librarian and adjunct professor of English and Honors Studies.