THE SEASON: A Fan's Story, a beautiful gift given out of love

THE SEASON: A Fan's Story
HELEN GARNER
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

One of Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of family life.

Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (The New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence.

Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.

The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. The Season finds Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, surprised to discover their riches—a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers.

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My Review: I really like Helen Garner's writing, enjoy her choices of subject matter, and really resonate with the worldview she puts out:

A little rush of desolation. It doesn't matter if I'm not there. No one needs me. I'm not essential after all. I'm only a witness. It's one of the sporadic bursts of reality that grandparents have to bear. You're making a serious mistake if you start to think you're near the centre. You're on the periphery. You're a servant. A hanger-on. And soon you'll be dead.

Preach, my sister.

What hasn't, won't, can't really die is the pleasure of an honest writer facing up to a tough subject (and there is no tougher subject than getting old!) with clear eyes, a willing heart, and a lifetime of practice, just...getting on with it. That is Helen Garner's métier. She speaks of her teenaged grandson with the mingled pride, amusement, and nostalgia for the rapidity of time and change carting away the one you made memories with while leaving a very roughly similar but perilously unfamiliar person in their place. I completely relate. Parents, grands, aging family members all feel a similar way, and what interests us is how much we obliviously assumed about our own pasts. Did we do better than they did? What Aunt Doraflora meant that one time she said the thing that made Dad so damn mad...oh! makes sense now, as we watch our futures doing, learning, figuring out in front of us.

The real matter of the writer is always life. Helen Garner has never once in a long career lost sight of that. Here she grapples with life changed beyond recognition, obsessions incomprehensible, worries she has no way to connect to, while knowing how much she loves; learning how much she is loved; and grappling with The End. "Really I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die."

It is a gift you leave him, Helen Garner, that he will open many times in his life. And, in his turn, in a world as different from this one you both briefly cohabited in as you and I can't even conjure, he will understand your thoughts and feelings. They will resemble yours...despite the immense gulf between you in time, you will connect on the humanness of being old, being alive without certainty, and...I know you hope, and so do I...feeling loved from ahead and behind.

FOUR SQUARES: A Novel, fun and games among the elderqueers

FOUR SQUARES: A Novel
BOBBY FINGER
GP Putnam's Sons
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel spanning the 1990s and present day, about a young writer and the community he builds in New York City, and his lonely life 30 years later when an unexpected injury lands him at the local queer senior center.

Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.

Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.

Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.

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My Review: Well! Was this ever an exercise in feeling seen! I *am* Artie. I though this would be a bubbly and effervescent flute full of story-champagne. More closely resembled a mug of authentic, bean-based xocolatl as opposed to, say, Swiss Miss.

Artie did what I've done with this life, cocooned himself in search of safety in a world he does not like interacting with all that much. He's been lucky, relate to that, he's got a solid basis for his existence at last, relate to that, and the family he's made takes the place of the non-family of origin, relate to that. All of this is balanced on a knife-edge, of course...all of life is, we just don't think about it until the balance is upset. Way big relate to that! So I vibrate like Annie Dillard's struck bell to all of these story points...what could possibly keep this from being a five-star read?

GALS.

I did not love these big, loud people anywhere near as much as I'd need to for me to rate the book five stars. I think the reason I don't adore them is that I felt unable to buy into them as people. They're perfect *characters, of the sort we see actors create for film or stage roles; they're the kind of characters I'd love to see a film about, in fact. I was expecting to be given a more nuanced and investment-able character in a novel, where there is so much more room to develop them. Artie, as a superb example, is developed to a solidity and dimensionality that demonstrates the author's considerable command of the skills needed. His found-family gals were also briefly but memorably limned...I understood they felt deeply their effect on Artie, and still had reasons for the action they took that hurt him.

So it wasn't lack of skill, then; what happened? I don't know. I also don't think I've seen any other reviewer bring this up as an issue, so permaybehaps it's just me being crotchety...? A very real possibility, not to be discounted or dismissed. I don't know how to test for it, or I would.

None of which is meant to be a warn-off, or even much of a caution. Bobby Finger writes good, solid stories, told in deft, enjoyable prose. I think the book belongs on your TBR if you liked his previous book, or of you liked The Guncle, or Nearlywed, or...does it need saying out loud that the world we live in is so immensely superior to the world we grew up in, fellow oldsters? We're able to choose from a huge variety of ways to feel seen and entertained that were, simply put, impossible to find in our youths.

Which is why the great haters so badly want to gain control of society's levers. If you see yourself as you could be, you'll try to become that; this means you won't be like them, and that is an existential threat.

Good. I've said it often, will say it often in future: Whatever it takes to make the great haters feel threatened and unhappy deserves our support.

THE KINGDOM OF SAND, older isn't always wiser

THE KINGDOM OF SAND
ANDREW HOLLERAN
FSG
$18.00 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

The Publisher Says: One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.

The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread—Andrew Holleran’s first new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents—during the height of the AIDS epidemic—and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.

At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl to watch classic films together and critique the neighbors. Earl is the only person in town with whom he can truly be himself. Now Earl’s health is failing, and our increasingly misanthropic narrator must contend with the fact that once Earl dies, he will be completely alone. He distracts himself with sexual encounters at the video porn store and visits to Walgreens. All the while, he shares reflections on illness and death that are at once funny and heartbreaking.

Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. The Kingdom of Sand displays all of Holleran’s considerable gifts; it’s an elegy to sex and a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.

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My Review: I'm getting older. No, let's not be American about it: I'm old. Stories are very comforting when they tell you about yourself as you'd like to be. They're less comforting when they hold a mirror to ourselves as we are.
This isn't a comforting story for me to read.

Dancer from the Dance was the roadmap for how I wanted to be in the 1970s: Rooms full of men fucking each other's brains out? Parties with mind-altering substances galore?! Sign me up! I'm ready to start this kind of life! This book, not so much.

Mostly because illness, isolation, and the slightly tedious repetitiveness of sex are my reality, and aren't very interesting to me unless they're freshly observed. Let's be honest, what's ever going to make this stuff fresh to those within it? It is not, as far as I can see, possible to make excitement and anticipation from the routine, mundane, quotidian life of Getting Old. Bearing in mind as I do daily that getting old is a privilege denied to most people, it is a curiously samey process. I'm aware that there are people aging vigorously and pursuing, in their seventies, activity levels I never attained. I'm also aware that I am stunningly lucky not to be dead or permanently cognitively impaired after January 2023's strokes. I don't mean there's only one way to get old: I mean getting old, no matter which way you slice it, has certain common themes that don't rev my readerly engine above idle speed.

I looked over what I've just written, thought "this doesn't sound like a four-star review," and called my Young Gentleman Caller to read it to him. Thank goodness I did! After A Long Silence, he finally said, "Tedious repetitiveness? Thanks a lot." Explaining to him what I actually meant, aside from reassuring his bruised feelings about my real opinion of his prowess, clarified the subject that's bothered me about the book since I read it.

Holleran's over a decade older than I am. As I read about the life he was describing, I thought about the sameness of the unnamed PoV character's life as repetitive, even...perhaps especially...his unchanged relationship to sex. The expectation of desire for the same kind of sex into one's older age isn't a sign of vigor to me, but a sign of arrested adolescence. The concerns about isolation, in that context, also read as adolesent fears of not being Hot, of never finding friends/boyfriends/partners when it feels like everyone around you has them, in general of FOMO.

Seriously? You're still on about this? is what I'd say to this guy if I met him. I don't want an orgy or a three-way anymore, I want to spend that hour and a half in the more rewarding, interesting leisurely touching, stroking, and communing with Rob, the man I know and want to know better. That's a whole different experience from cruising the porn store as does our aging Casanova. Part of that is, again, down to my good luck. There is someone in my life who elicits these feelings from me, and is willing to reciprocate them. That's what I thought Earl meant to our PoV character, whose lack of a name feels to me like a reinforcement of this guy's utter and complete adolescent narcissism. "Only I am Real, everyone else is an extra in the movie of my life." And this is in spite of the fact that PoVman is basically spending the whole of his time in this book narrating Earl's decline and fall into the Endless!

Oh dear, again I'm veering into the not-highly-rating territory.

This is why I've had such trouble reviewing the book. It's a much better literary experience than I'm making it sound like. Look at the thoughts it's causing me to examine! Look at the depth of attention it summons out of me! I'm having interesting, important conversations with my Young Gentleman Caller because I need his help to process my feelings about the read.

Author Holleran is a fine wordsmith, with an opera librettist's ear for sentences that sing in my ear:

I believed somehow in the absurd idea that if you ate right you could live indefinitely. Even when, a decade after my mother‘s death, I began getting skin cancers, all I could think of was: how could this be? Given all the broccoli I’ve eaten? It must be loneliness, I concluded, the lack of a person to live for other than myself, since we are also told that health is psychosomatic.
–and–
The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going.
–and–
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

There's a lot of this kind of thoughtful, careful observation in the book. Given the gargantuan tragedy and Black-Death-level reaping of the men in his generation's cohort, observing is safer than involving. The porn store isn't a casual or haphazard choice for the narrator's sex life. The reporting of life is safer than the living of it:

One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.
–and–
Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother's voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice.
–and–
Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.
–and–
I see in the distance on streets I don’t usually take, merely because I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy.

I didn't find my life changed by this book but I did find in it much to interrogate, about myself, my present, my past; and that's a very rare thing for a book to do in a world of escapism and avoidance of the depths of experience. That Author Holleran did this while using surfaces and appearances and absences made it impressive to me on a literary level while keeping me at a greater distance from PoVman's life than I'd require to give the book my highest accolades.

Make no mistake, this is a good book. It's not great, but it's good, and I hope you'll read it one day soon.

Maybe borrow it from the library, though.

THE SUNSET GANG, old age ain't for sissies but it can be played for laughs

THE SUNSET GANG: Inspirational Short Stories That Reshape the Meaning of Aging
WARREN ADLER
Stonehouse Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In America, where "old" is a dirty word, people over sixty-five are often shut out as if growing old were some kind of contagious disease. But you cannot shut the Sunset Gang out of your heart.

With time running short, these intrepid residents of Sunset Village in Florida continue to thirst for life and love.

"The Sunset Gang" is as lively, fun, and courageous a group as you'll find anywhere this side of the Last Reward. The fact that you'll find them at Sunset Village, a condominium retirement community in Florida - where an ambulance siren is the theme song and cycling at a stately pace is strenuous exercise - does not mean that they are ready to pack it all in. Not by a long shot.

Sex and romantic love keep Sunset Village bubbling with activity.

If you were to walk down one of its well-tended paths, you might spot Jenny and Bill sitting on a bench, acting like young lovers, and never suspect that they are married - to other people! And at the pool, Max Bernstein, with an expertise that comes from five decades of skirt chasing, is singling out attractive widows.

But the true beating heart of Sunset Village is the love of family and friends. Widowed Molly Berkowitz learns that although her son and daughter may be failures in the eyes of the world, they are well worth bragging about, and Isaac Kramer begins to feel truly at home when the gray-haired boys down at the Laundromat start calling him by his old neighborhood nickname, "Itch."

This short story series about aging in America that inspired the PBS American Playhouse TV trilogy produced by Linda Lavin and starring Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, Dori Brenner and Jerry Stiller, garnering Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for 'Best Supporting Actress' in a mini-series.

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My Review: Waitaminnit waitaminnit whereinahell's the Bryce Method, you ask...I hear you, don't front! I'll tell you the truth: much as I say "blahblah isn't a novel, it's a récit or braided stories or a syncretism of Egyptian death-spells with upanishads or whatever," I am equally likely to say this is a novel when told it's stories.

Just that the chapters are a funny length.

For funny old Jewish people, that shouldn't be a problem. And honestly it isn't. This is a comfort read. I got lots and lots of laughs, and as I live in a building full of old Jewish folk, I was frequently trying not to read chunks of it aloud to...no one in particular (it says here). The late Warren Adler knew exactly what he was doing writing this entertaining chronicle of aging and its indignities hidden behind a very slippery figleaf. Laughing at people is frowned on, rightly so, in today's world. But laughing at yourself, and with your friends, is the way to stay sane in a world that won't listen to you, doesn't much want you, but still has your heart walking around in it.

That's everyone in here. While the author first published it in 1977, when a lot of the world's prejudices were different, the list of concerns of the Greatest-Generation cast of Jewish folks sounds exactly the way my neighbors sound. It's a little odd, when I think about it, that the immigrants raised in the 1930s on the Lower East Side and Brownsville who mostly populate the book are darn near clones of the Long Island facility I occupy. But I think it shows cultural continuity is very much a feature of Jewish identity. I know several of my friends here are children of Auschwitz and other camp survivors...only recently, early in COVID, did our last survivor resident die. (Vale Arthur, quit nagging Yhwh about what she needs to do better.)

Oh, okay. I can't resist the power of Tradition in this context. Bryce, your method lives!

Yiddish revs up the ol' libido when two assimilated folk reconnect with their mother tongue.

Itch reminds of the moment in Cranford when Judi Dench, as Miss Mattie, mourns her sister's death with the unbearably poignant musing, "Now there is no one left who will call me Matilda." A name is an identity, and as it disappears, one grows lonely for it and for what it stood for in one's life.

An Unexpected Visit reminds us all that there's a steady beat of time passing, and with its passing it's taking away forever the means of getting inside someone's head.

The Detective *chuckle* Pride goeth before a fall; Pride goeth before a fall. Different concepts, same outcome: No more pride and a lot of nasty vanity spread over top of everything.

God Made Me That Way, and pausing in one's day to thank her for it is a good idea since it means the right one will indeed come along.

The Braggart proves that empty gourds make the most noise.

The Demonstration limns the timelessness of battling hatred in her den.

The Angel of Mercy feels "The End" coming up over the horizon, and...it's okay.

Poor Herman proves that no matter how long true, spirit-deep friends are separated, they're really still the same friends.

The Home is a fate worse than death. It is...The End...but the curtain stays up. *shudder* Sooner I would die, thank you please.

THE LEISURE SEEKER, soon to be a major (indie) motion picture! Helen Mirren! Donald Sutherland!

THE LEISURE SEEKER
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN
William Morrow
$15.99 trade paper, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.25* of five

***UPDATE! AVAILABLE ON STARZ & AMAZON PRIME!


***UPDATE 10/3/2017 Here's a clip that makes me really hopeful for the film's fidelity to the source material. And here's an Hollywood Reporter interview with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland! Dream casting!***


**UPDATE 11/10/2016 A feature film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland will debut in the US during 2017. Talk about dream casting for your novel's movie! I hope Michael Zadoorian is as well served by the screenwriters and producers as he stands to be by his characters' faces.**

The Publisher Says: A sort of Easy Rider meets The Notebook, Michael Zadoorian’s poignant, funny, vibrant, and unforgettable novel, The Leisure Seeker, is a story of two seniors who escape from their retirement home and embark upon a hilarious and touching end-of-life road trip. Here is a story that will appeal to a wide range of readers: from retiring Baby Boomers to fans of Mitch Albom, Tom Perotta, David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, and Nicholas Sparks. In fact, the Detroit Free Press says, “I would recommend Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker to almost anyone.”

My Review: The Robinas got old one day. They couldn't tell you which day, exactly...he has Alzheimer's, she's just old and frankly after a certain point who can tell the days apart anyway?...but it happened, and now, well, The End isn't on the horizon anymore, it's on the to-do list.

Three quotes will tell you all that you need to know about this book. If they fail to appeal, so will this wry, loving, unsparing look at the parade's end:

“We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I’m not, for crying out loud. Don’t be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life.”(p37)

“I think about the people in the slides, most of them gone now, heart attacks and cancers, betrayed by the foods we ate, by our La-Z-Boys, by our postwar contentment, everyone getting larger and larger in every year’s photographs, our prosperity gone wide.” (p57)


“We pass on the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore. I never much cared for the man. A big phony, I believe. Anyone who never met a man he didn’t like just isn’t trying hard enough.” (p79)

Seriously...tell me that's not pitch-perfect coming from a thirtysomething writer's imagination. The Robinas are delightful company on their last trip.

GREYBEARD, childless post-apocalyptic Earth--chilling

GREYBEARD
BRIAN W. ALDISS
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Human reproduction has ceased and society slowly spirals in this “adult Lord of the Flies” by a Grand Master of Science Fiction (San Francisco Chronicle).

After the “Accident,” all males on Earth become sterile. Society ages and falls apart bit by bit. First, toy companies go under. Then record companies. Then cities cease to function. Now Earth’s population lives in spread‑out, isolated villages, with its youngest members in their fifties. When the people of Sparcot begin to make claims of gnomes and man‑eating rodents lurking around their village, Greybeard and his wife set out for the coast with the hope of finding something better.

My Review: The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on themselves. Was slighty revised by the author in 2012. First published in 1964, at the tail end of one of the scariest passages during the Cold War, this post-apocalyptic look at the resilience and the lack of same in the human spirit was involving and affecting. It was also a disorganized mess.

spoilers! here be spoilers!

Chapters 1-3 take place in 2025 and on, or the mid-point of the story. Chapter 4 takes place as the world finds its way through the crisis. Chapter 5 has us back in about 2030...Chapter 6 is early days of the Accident, as the sterilization of Earth's humans is called...and then back to 2030 in Chapter 7. It's kind of a confused way to tell a story. Not that it's a complicated story, but it's always nice to have things move along in sequence when there's no reason, stylistic or otherwise, for them not to.

Aldiss' Introduction to the 2012 edition tells of the genesis of the story...a divorce, a general reduction of his life to solitude, and a desperate yearning for his lost kids...and I must say that this Introduction is what kept me going for the whole short 237ish pages. I could relate to his sense of loss and his almost desperate longing. I looked for those things in his text and really didn't find them too terribly often. Many things occur in the book, but few of them happen, if you see what I mean; Greybeard, the main character, and Martha, Greybeard's wife, aren't prone to overstatement. Jeff, a character whose slippery presence is highly emotionally charged, makes little impact in the end. Charley, the dopey religious nut, isn't much of a shakes for shakin' stuff up either. Dr. Jingadangelow (!) the snake oil salesman is fun...I picture Eddie Izzard playing the role in a movie...but rattles on and rockets off ballistically.

I didn't love the book, but it's got at its heart a futureless bleakness that I myownself resonate with. After 50-plus years and despiter a relatively recent revisuion, the Accident's specifics don't quite line up with reality. I really have no smallest problem imagining specifics that end us up in the same narrative place. One day soon, y'all should go read Sir Roy Calne's book Too Many People. I can see that causing the Accident with all too great a clarity of inner vision.

On the low end of the recommend-to-others scale, and then only to those who like post-apocalyptic stories.

SOLO by Rana Dasgupta...lovely and unsettling, unnerving and deeply satisfying

SOLO
RANA DASGUPTA
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
various prices, now out of print

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Alexander Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams--and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.

My Review: It's very tough to reduce this book to a synopsis. Ulrich, born in the dawning years of the 20th century in Sofia, Bulgaria, is the thwarted and stunted son of a Germanophile railway engineer. His Philistine father and dreamy mother battle their lives away, not listening or hearing or caring; they end up deaf. Ulrich ends up unable to feel, to engage with life, or to make sense of the world. His wife and son vanish; his career grows ever thicker and more ungainly to fill the space; then, one day, it too vanishes. What he is left with, after a lifetime of failure and eventual blindness, is...space. He is a void encompassed by flesh. He is one hundred when we meet him. His slow, exquisite dis-integration is the resolution of the story of his life...it is the final act of a mind unable to bear frictionless, affectless existence one more second.

It is beautiful. Rana Dasgupta, the author of Solo, is only now forty. I hate his skinny ass. This is the book James Joyce would've written if he'd ever found his way past the success of the tedious and pretentious Ulysses. And here this guy with a short story collection under his belt unrolls this gorgeous Caucasian carpet of a book before he's forty! Hate is so mild a term for the envious longing and shivering, ecstatic loathing that possesses me as I read his sentences, and twine myself about his fractal geometry of a story.

Rather than try to make things clear to you myself, let me quote to you from pp334-335 of the book:

"He was like the other half of myself," says Boris...Ulrich says, "You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.
"He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.
"There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.
"You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being."

In reading that passage again, I feel like Annie Dillard's bell..."it was as though I had lived my entire life as a bell and never known it until I was struck"...and I finally unraveled the book I'd read: Meditation on failure and grief? No; not that; a more subtle and wonderful thing: Like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a shout in the face of closed minds to open, to live, to exist fully if only for one glittering moment.