Starlite Terrace (The German List) - Hardcover

Roth, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857420828 ISBN 13: 9780857420824

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2013

Synopsis

Dark stories of failed dreams and contemporary desperation in Los Angeles.

In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.

 

In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,” Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,” Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played” on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,” strives to find an escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,” June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.

 


In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.

 

About this title

About the Authors

Patrick Roth has been working as an Los Angeles-based film journalist and ex-pat author of German novels and plays for three decades.

Krishna Winston, professor and chair of the German Studies Department in the Wesleyan University, is the principal English-language translator for the works of the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, she also translated Peter Handke’s Don Juan.

Reviews

What stories can the little people tell? That seems to be the question German expat film critic and author Roth hopes to answer with this collection set in a Los Angeles apartment building. Each story features a dusty Hollywood lifer who, although touched by greatness, never manages to achieve it. His characters have encounters with old Hollywood royalty and hold on to these fleeting, tenuous moments as cornerstones in their personal histories. In meandering, seemingly aimless narratives, each of Roth’s characters tells the stories that, for them, solidify their small roles in Hollywood legend. A woman’s husband has an affair with Marilyn Monroe (with whom she shares a birthday). A man shares a brief moment with Gary Cooper as he makes his farewells before succumbing to cancer. In each story, Roth’s inquisitive narrator is barely present, stepping aside to let the characters tell their stories. The slow, dreamy pacing may be off-putting to some, but for those who love basking in rambling tales, and who are fascinated by Hollywood, there is plenty here to love. --Sarah Hunter

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857420828
• ISBN 13: 9780857420824
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184