10:04: Ben Lerner Ben Lerner’s skill lies in his brilliant marriage of external and internal human interactions. Anyone who has read Lerner’s clever second novel remembers the opening chapter and the narrator’s fraught description of eating baby octopuses. This review for NPR explores the octopus image as central to the structure of the novel: “Here is a snippet where our narrator describes New York City girding for Hurricane Irene. Note how octopuses and aortas swirl into the hurricane update in this passage: ‘From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and … inflecting traffic patterns … I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swelled. There were myriad apps to track it … the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.’ … The final scene of this novel, where our narrator and his pregnant close friend walk through a blacked-out Lower Manhattan as Hurricane Sandy bears down, is as beautiful and moving as any of the tributes to New York written by other famous literary ‘walkers in the city,’ like Walt Whitman and Alfred Kazin, who are presiding presences here. 10:04 is a strange and spectacular novel. Don’t even worry about classifying it; just let Lerner’s language sweep you off your feet
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10:04: Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner’s skill lies in his brilliant marriage of external and internal human interactions. Anyone who has read Lerner’s clever second novel remembers the opening chapter and the narrator’s fraught description of eating baby octopuses.
This review for NPR explores the octopus image as central to the structure of the novel: “Here is a snippet where our narrator describes New York City girding for Hurricane Irene. Note how octopuses and aortas swirl into the hurricane update in this passage: ‘From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and … inflecting traffic patterns … I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swelled. There were myriad apps to track it … the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.’ … The final scene of this novel, where our narrator and his pregnant close friend walk through a blacked-out Lower Manhattan as Hurricane Sandy bears down, is as beautiful and moving as any of the tributes to New York written by other famous literary ‘walkers in the city,’ like Walt Whitman and Alfred Kazin, who are presiding presences here. 10:04 is a strange and spectacular novel. Don’t even worry about classifying it; just let Lerner’s language sweep you off your feet.” #libreriarecommends #libtryptich #benlerner #nprreviews #ivegottostopeatingdeliciousdeliciousoctopus
10:04: Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner’s skill lies in his brilliant marriage of external and internal human interactions. Anyone who has read Lerner’s clever second novel remembers the opening chapter and the narrator’s fraught description of eating baby octopuses.
This review for NPR explores the octopus image as central to the structure of the novel: “Here is a snippet where our narrator describes New York City girding for Hurricane Irene. Note how octopuses and aortas swirl into the hurricane update in this passage: ‘From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and … inflecting traffic patterns … I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swelled. There were myriad apps to track it … the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.’ … The final scene of this novel, where our narrator and his pregnant close friend walk through a blacked-out Lower Manhattan as Hurricane Sandy bears down, is as beautiful and moving as any of the tributes to New York written by other famous literary ‘walkers in the city,’ like Walt Whitman and Alfred Kazin, who are presiding presences here. 10:04 is a strange and spectacular novel. Don’t even worry about classifying it; just let Lerner’s language sweep you off your feet.” #libreriarecommends #libtryptich #benlerner #nprreviews #ivegottostopeatingdeliciousdeliciousoctopus
