The Museum of Love - Hardcover

Weiner, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879515317 ISBN 13: 9780879515317

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1994

Synopsis

A hallucinatory and startlingly powerful first novel, a darkly visionary On the Road for the upcoming millennium, The Museum of Love traces the macabre and compelling journey of a young French Canadian from his oppressive home town on the shores of Lake Superior across North America. His father is a morbid prison guard, his mother a mystical Catholic, his brother an adolescent saint and martyr while he, an innocent and receptive vessel, fiercely intelligent, anti-religious and tentatively homosexual, inhabits a vivid and strangely lit yet oddly recognizable world - the one that exists only on the inside of a dreamer's eyelids, between the bed and the wall. As Jean-Michel Verhaeren makes his surreal journey of madness and freedom, he experiences the walking wounded, suicides of friends, hostile geographies and periodic moments of extreme clarity - ecstatic visits to the Museums of Negritude, Religion, Love and Death. A work of phantasmagorias and ecstasies, of brutality and tenderness, The Museum of Love is an extraordinary debut.

About this title

About the Author

Steve Weiner was born in Wisconsin, studied writing at the University of California, and went on to study film animation. His first novel, The Museum of Love, was published in eight countries to wide acclaim and shortlisted for Canada's prestigious Giller Prize. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

From Kirkus Reviews

A hellish journey--through a heartland of 50's America bizarrely transformed as if by a series of lightning flashes--is undertaken by a youth too calculating to be innocent yet a victim worthy of pity: a savagely stark debut by Vancouver-based Weiner. Summary inadequately represents such a tale steeped in bile and bitterness, but the plot's main elements are similar, featuring death and visions of decay to palpable excess. The boy, Jean-Michel Verhaeren, lives in crumbling St. Croix on the frigid north shore of Canada's Georgian Bay. His father is a sadistic prison guard, his mother an ex-convent girl with a tenuous grip on reality, his brother Ignace an albino with a religious bent. Jean, one leg stunted, has a place among these misbegotten, but he bears the additional burden of being effeminate. He attracts admirers only to drive them to suicide through his fickleness, while his father is arraigned for fatally abusing a black inmate. Jean goes to reform school for arson, but is released; he then runs away to the US after being a party to Ignace's drowning, beginning a series of adventures that leads him steadily southward. He keeps the company of Albanians, bums, blacks, the zealous, and the lame, hearing their stories, and visits surreal museums of orphans, love, and death. Along the way, he reunites briefly with his parents, watching his father die in Missouri and his mother dissolve into the Caribbean, before founding his own museum in Haiti, where n‚gritude, so vital to his family's fortunes, can be properly pondered. Compelling in its singleness of purpose--to touch corruption in all its guises--this also reaches the dark, despairing heart of the American dream in a way that few other recent stories have. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0879515317
• ISBN 13: 9780879515317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224