Desolation of Avenues Untold

by Brandon Hobson

LOST CHAPLIN FILMS DISCOVERED Los Angeles -A private collection of films involving the famous actor Charlie Chaplin was uncovered on Monday, according to numerous sources. A reel of Chaplin's private home films, including a sexual encounter containing over 30 minutes of footage, had been stored for many years in Switzerland in the basement of Anton Bon Scott, a former friend of Chaplin's. The acclaimed actor evidently kept private films of his sexual encounters throughout his life and asked Mr. Scott to preserve them after Chaplin's death. The private reel is the only film unseen by anyone other than Chaplin and perhaps a few others. "They're somewhere in the middle of nowhere," sources state. "They're in Texas, I think. They're not here in L.A." Film historians have described the discovery as "priceless."

Genres: Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published August 25, 2015

About the author

Dr. Brandon Hobson is an American writer. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and also teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Brandon Hobson’s Desolation of Avenues Untold four months ago and I’ve been mulling over it since. In Desolation. . ., Hobson provides an unusual admixture of a novel. One ingredient is an all-too-convincing portrayal and satire of a seemingly trivial American conspiracy theory run amok, together with its all-too-American conspiracy theorists. A second ingredient is the subject of that conspiracy theory, the obsessive search for a never-released, Charlie Chaplin private pornographic film. For those who aren’t satisfied with watching all four versions of A Star is Born and then insist on tracking down its 1932 original, Hobson gives us a wonderful send up of obsessive film buffs. A third ingredient — mingled with the conspiracy and the obsessive search — is an utterly convincing and deeply affecting portrait of Bornfeldt Chaplin’s flawed love for his obsessive son WIll, and Born's growing realization that his love for Will can’t be matched by any consistency in acting on his paternal love. It’s this third ingredient that transforms Desolation. . . from an amusing and telling satire into a novel that’s much more.

Brandon Hobson makes you laugh and he makes you chuckle. The reader needs to suspend judgement and ride along with Born, Will, and the large cast of weird characters. The very structure of Desolation. . . is a wink and a nod at self-referential and meta-fictional novels. The foreword — with the cubicle mate of a fictional Brandon Hobson recounting Hobson’s secretively pulling out of the front of his pants a reel of film — and the concluding exchange of emails between the fictional Brandon Hobson and the Swiss Silent Film Archive — serve as humorous bookends for this wildly imaginative and disconcertingly thought-provoking novel. Hobson — the author Brandon Hobson, not the fictional Hobson — occasionally digresses and occasionally gives us more words and more characters where fewer might have been better, but these are overshadowed by Desolation of Avenues Untold’s many strengths. This is a novel that deserves to be read, thought about, and discussed. Brandon Hobson, whose 2018 Where the Dead Sit Talking was a National Book Award finalist and whose earlier Deep Ellum is a disturbing tale of the persistence of familial love, deserves far more readership and attention than the sixteen GoodReads ratings for the excellent Desolation of Avenues Untold.

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fever dream of our contemporary obsessiveness and how it are leading us into new categories of catatonia. Which is another way of saying that, among its other virtues (e.g., sensitivity to place / landscape; ear for how we talk and don't talk [or anti-converse]), this book is satire of real subtlety and incisiveness.

[Halsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

What the literal, actual fuck was this book about?

[Hamish · Rating 1 out of 5]

not every book needs to be compared to infinite jest but this really reminded me of it in a bad way. Hobson seemed a little too excited about the idea, and a little too reliant on dialogue, to the point of wastefulness, for this to really be successful. Bogged down by his own cleverness. An editor (especially a copyeditor) should have cut about 10% of the fluff here. potential missed. im certain im missing some references, allegories, etc. here, but i basically just wanted this to be over as soon as it started.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptionally strange and compelling novel about private films, drugs, hardcore music, fatherhood, obsession, paranoia, and American decay. Drawing from the structures of experimental filmmaking, Hobson creates a truly singular literary experience.

[Michael DeSimone · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars

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References Lewis for some reason