Life in the Land of Living - Softcover

Vilmure, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571153739 ISBN 13: 9780571153732

Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1988

Synopsis

Two brothers take off on a spree through a seedy Florida port town on a hot August night

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Two nameless brothers, one a teenager and the other about five years younger, begin the night that this hard-hitting first novel describes by sneaking into a drive-in. Their father an abusive drunk, their mother gone with another man, the boys have only each other, and it's not enough. Their nighttime wanderings cut a steady trail to disaster, the older boy, illiterate, drunk and seriously sick, the younger following along partly in order to help, partly not to be left alone. From the drive-in where a murder interrupts the James Dean double feature, they meet their father in a bar, where the older boy saves him from being killed by the mother's lover, only to be knocked senseless for his efforts. After instigating destruction at a McDonald's where they hook up with a stuttering storytelling friend, they're off again, beaten-up, sleepless and faint from hunger. Violence accretessome done by the brothers to others, some done by others to them, some done by each to the otherculminating in two final acts of horror. Setting his novel in a deteriorating Florida town in the breathless hours before a heavy storm, Vilmure may have used a few broad strokes to tell of the brothers' dark and terrible passage, but his prose is as powerful and well-aimed as the punches that propel the tale to its riveting, inevitable end.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Set on the mean streets of a Florida coastal city, this overwrought first novel depicts the cataclysmic dissolution of a troubled family. At the start of the novel's long, stormy night, a pair of unnamed brothers witness the beating of their alcoholic father and the killing of a man by a woman he has just raped. Already at the edge, the older brother snaps, and in the resulting spree murders his father, burns the house of his mother and her lover while they are inside, and finally causes his own violent death. Vilmure is attempting a tragic, darkly poetic exploration of the effects of family and poverty-induced rage; the result is a starkly violent novel thick with heavy-handed symbolism. Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass .
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0571153739
• ISBN 13: 9780571153732
• Binding: Paperback