ENTER Tadio Koelb, debutant novelist who dazzles with this startingly inventive account of power, desire, mendacity and duplicity.
Koelb's writing credentials are indicative of his creative presence --
graduate of the writing programme at the University of East Anglia, he has translated André Gide’s work, and is an active reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications and teaches writing at Rutgers University.
With this he gives us a reading experience that resonates with dark themes and melodic prose; a story of a man-woman whose duplicity of persona fools not only his tortured family and compliant friends but in essence himself.
Trenton Makes is an ingenious construct that explores the American dream in the grim backdrop of a post-war factory town where a woman kills her husband and then assumes a male identity to hide from the law and society.
At times the narrative mystifies with its apparent complexity of structure.
With considered overview it is actually an ordered, bewitching writing form.
It is not an easy read, requiring much introspection
Notwithstanding this, Koelb's work refreshes with its challenge .
The writer explores the treacherous nature of nature itself that can offload a twisted body and mind on that what should be perfection.
A facial disfigurement; a lame and twisted limb -- and
scrambling synapes in the memory cells
Word bites from Mr Koelb's prose from the "Trenton that makes and the world that takes" :
A rusting maverick needle swimming through the bloodstream;
small and dense, and full of quiet menace;
the running brook of his ideas heard gurgling through his throat.
A melliflous, bewitching, melodic experience.
Koelb's writing credentials are indicative of his creative presence --
graduate of the writing programme at the University of East Anglia, he has translated André Gide’s work, and is an active reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications and teaches writing at Rutgers University.
With this he gives us a reading experience that resonates with dark themes and melodic prose; a story of a man-woman whose duplicity of persona fools not only his tortured family and compliant friends but in essence himself.
Trenton Makes is an ingenious construct that explores the American dream in the grim backdrop of a post-war factory town where a woman kills her husband and then assumes a male identity to hide from the law and society.
At times the narrative mystifies with its apparent complexity of structure.
With considered overview it is actually an ordered, bewitching writing form.
It is not an easy read, requiring much introspection
Notwithstanding this, Koelb's work refreshes with its challenge .
The writer explores the treacherous nature of nature itself that can offload a twisted body and mind on that what should be perfection.
A facial disfigurement; a lame and twisted limb -- and
scrambling synapes in the memory cells
Word bites from Mr Koelb's prose from the "Trenton that makes and the world that takes" :
A rusting maverick needle swimming through the bloodstream;
small and dense, and full of quiet menace;
the running brook of his ideas heard gurgling through his throat.
A melliflous, bewitching, melodic experience.