Boing Boing's Review of _Liberation_ by Brian Francis Slattery

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Actually got to hear Slattery reading his work to music at a bar in Brooklyn last Friday.  Read aloud, it's great stuff, but it looks like it could be tough going in book form.  I'll probably give it a try at some point.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Sent: Nov 19, 2008 10:20 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Boing Boing's Review of _Liberation_ by Brian Francis Slattery
>
>Boing Boing's Review of _Liberation_ by Brian Francis Slattery:
>
>Brian Francis Slattery's novel Liberation is a magical, riveting
>poetic story of a post-economic America where the dollar has vanished
>and slavery has sprung up in the resulting economic chaos. It concerns
>the adventures of the Slick Six, a gang of fun-loving super-criminals
>whose unbeatable fighter, Marco, is at sea on a prison-ship when the
>nation falters. The guards on the ship kill the warden, begin to trade
>prisoners to slavers for food and fuel, and Marco kills them all, sets
>the ship free, sails the world, and comes back to what's left of
>America.
>America has dissolved. New York is now the barony of The Aardvark, the
>crimelord who put Marco away in the first place, as punishment for the
>Slick Six's incursions against his territories. The Aardvark presides
>over the capitalization and enforcement of slave-farms across America,
>and he hunts all of the Slick Six with a mindless, unwavering
>determination to wreak perfect vengeance.
>
>Marco resolves to find and reunite the Slick Six and to use them as a
>spearhead in a war on the institution of slavery and on The Aardvark,
>who reaps a fortune from it. And therein begins the tale, a road-novel
>that tears back and forth across America, told from the point of view
>of The Vibe, or fate, which guides the hands of all the dozens of
>remarkable characters in the story.
>
>Slattery's prose style is complex, poetic, visionary and reeling, a
>cross between Kerouac and Bradbury, salted with Steinbeck. His people
>are all magic -- a tribe of stoners called the Americoids, a resurgent
>Sioux nation led by a visionary war-chief, a hive-like murderous
>circus, a free-state in Asheville presided over by an American
>Brahmin-turned-mayor, the prisoners on the liberated ship.
>
>In Marco, we meet one of the great tortured heroes of fiction: an
>unstoppable badass who is haunted by his past as a child-soldier and
>who hunts now for peace with his past and a future he can be proud of.
>There is action and dashing in the story and true love and music and
>cooking and acrobatics and commerce and economics and crime and
>nobility. It's a heady stew, a road novel shot through with mysticism
>and a love of freedom that soars over the pages.
>
>In case it's not clear, I loved this book. I can't wait to read more
>(I've just ordered Spaceman Blues, Slattery's first novel). This is a
>book to fall in love with.