Also Rising - Softcover

Innis, Windsor Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595152007 ISBN 13: 9780595152001

Publisher: iUniverse, 2000

Synopsis

(Innis) balanced yet stirring description of the bullfight becomes the subtext for his sensitive depiction of the life of a dedicated artist.Publishers Weekly Amusing portrait of the artist as an earnest schlemiel, leavened with an ironic, Hemingwayesque admiration of its south-of-the-boarder setting...brilliantly executed.Kirkus Reviews Finely drawn with a cunning display of detail and internal emotional conflicts, this bittersweet tale...reveals much of the inner nature of human courage, love and ambition.The Dallas Morning News

About this title

About the Author:

W. Joe Innis has lived and worked as an artist in many countries throughout the world, exhibiting in Tokyo, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and New York. His work is featured in many books and periodicals. Former columnist for The Artists Magazine, he has published two art related novels.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Choppy postmodern backward glance at Hemingwayesque bullfighting ethos, recast as a macho conflict between artists in southern Mexico. First-novelist/Artist's Magazine columnist Innis can't help but feel sorry for Isaac Sherderval, a struggling Impressionist painter who, in 1970, takes a teaching gig at an American art school in southern Mexico in order to forget his failed marriage- -as well as his forgettable songwriting day job. But what begins as a quaint, American-in-paradox, fish-out-of-water tale in the scenic if sorry town of San Miguel de Allende soon becomes a mano a mano contest between Sherderval and Heinrich Guerber, a German-born pop artist who's achieved wealth and notoriety among the New York art crowd by painting over works by well-known French and American Impressionists. Guerber, who's making a triumphal return to his alma mater, tells Sherderval that he finds only cruelty and barbarity in bullfighting--whereupon Sherderval counters by praising it as a solemn, vital cultural ritual that resonates with his own artistic endeavors. The two agree to try the cape before inexperienced bulls at a nearby ranch, with the prize being Guerber's slender, model-beautiful girlfriend Memori. In a brilliantly executed scene, Guerber suffers an easy success but lacks the courage to go up against a formidable beast. And Sherderval embarrasses, then redeems himself, not through courage, but through a series of accidents that inadvertently express his romantic indifference to danger. Sherderval's fling with Memori and Innis's message--that artists need unequal portions of solitude, historical tradition, and appreciation--are forgotten when sore-losing Guerber falsely accuses Sherderval of harboring drugs. Sherderval flees with his windy artist friend Sturgeon Boswell, who prattles on about what is or isn't good for artists and saves Sherderval from a fate worse than marriage. Amusing, pretentiously anti-pretentious, portrait of the artist as an earnest schlemiel, leavened with an ironic, Hemingwayesque admiration of its south-of-the-border setting. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0595152007
• ISBN 13: 9780595152001
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268