Conversation on GR in NYC

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:34 AM, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_60thanniversary_bnevents.html#tp
>
> Scroll down to the bottom of the page: Emily Barton and Robert Stone
> in a discussion of GR, moderated by Gerald Howard. 7 p.m., November 2nd,
> in B&N, Upper East Side. I'll be in NYC only two weeks later, but I'll
> miss this. Dang! Would love to hear what Robert Stone has to say of
> GR, and just loved Howard's piece on the novel in BookForum. Dang.

Barton’s first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron, was published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January 2000. The book’s titular character
is an inventor in the primitive and isolated farming village of
Mandragora. When Gundron invents the harness – a device which alters
the nature of farming – the villagers' lives change irrevocably. As
Yves begins to recount the story of these changes, Ruth Blum, a
Harvard anthropologist, arrives to study the village. Although the
novel at first appears to take place in the Middle Ages, Yves’s
brother tells tales of travels to "Indo-China," and the villagers sing
songs that are demonstrably examples of the blues.

Some critics found Barton's technique of juxtaposing cultural milieus
jarring. But many appreciated the novel's postmodern gamesmanship. In
a rare blurb, the famously reticent writer Thomas Pynchon praised Yves
Gundron as “[b]lessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt—a story
that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world
even as it shines with the integrity of dream" ...

[...]

Barton's second novel, Brookland, was published in 2006. Brookland
takes as its basis Thomas Pope’s Rainbow Bridge, a bridge that was
proposed for the East River nearly a hundred years before the
construction of John Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, but which was never
actually built ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Barton#Novels