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Locus Amoenus
In this beautifully nuanced dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, have retreated from Brooklyn to the idyllic rural countryside upstate, where for nearly eight years they have run a sustainable farm. Unfortunately, their outrageously obese neighbors, who prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture, reject their elitist ways (recycling, eating healthy, reading).
Hamlet, who is now eighteen, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, when health, happiness, and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Paxil, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father's death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius.
Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when he learns from Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, that Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, and corruption will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare's play, to tragedy.
Pronounced: "low cus a mean us"
Advanced praise for Locus Amoenus from the back cover
A satirical examination of how we live in the 21st century, in the United Estates of America, with less civilization and more discontents than hitherto. Amidst nostalgic reflections on our past, Alexander notices current absurdities and contradictions in our appetites and critique of consumerism, and despite the tragedy, we have the consolation of her humor. I haven't laughed this well while reading in a long time.
-Josip Novakovich, author of Shopping for a Better Country
Brilliantly combining Shakespeare's knowing personal-political masterpiece, Hamlet, with post-911 ruminations of an edifying diversity of characters inhabiting Amenia in rural New York, novelist Victoria N. Alexander manages to do the three things that Nabokov says a good novelist must do: tell a story, inform, and enchant. Locus Amœnus, a short, sweet, sui generis blend of contemporary adult fiction and geopolitical drama, reminds us that something may be rotten in more than Denmark.
-Dorion Sagan, author of The Cosmic Apprentice
This brilliant, searing political novel deserves to be read by all of those interested in the current and future state of the United States of America. Darkly comic, wry and witty, Locus Amœnus is a genuine pastoral, a critique of the bloating and corruption of American life that draws on Hamlet for its dissection of politics, relationships, and love in post-9/11 America. From Swift to Shakespeare, the literary antecedents for Locus Amœnus are wide and varied, but the novel that emerges is wholly original and haunting in its graphic depiction of contemporary American mores and failures. I can't recommend Victoria N. Alexander's new novel enough.
-Oona Frawley, author of Flight
A tale of dark political corruption, betrayal and a through the looking-glass world where you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, Locus Amœnus is also a fiercely funny romp by a talented writer.
-Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor
Alexander's Locus Amœnus is a biting, witty, and ultimately touching window on modern American life. She evokes the wit and depth of the best of Kingsolver and high satire and earnest social exploration of Pynchon or Delillo. Her experiences bridging the worlds of rural and urban northeastern America provide those of us with experience of both a welcomed bit of nostalgia, longing, familiarity, and a sense of loss. This story is to be savored, and hopefully re-read in certain existential moods.
-David Koepsell, author of Reboot World
Hamlet, who is now eighteen, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, when health, happiness, and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Paxil, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father's death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius.
Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when he learns from Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, that Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, and corruption will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare's play, to tragedy.
Pronounced: "low cus a mean us"
Advanced praise for Locus Amoenus from the back cover
A satirical examination of how we live in the 21st century, in the United Estates of America, with less civilization and more discontents than hitherto. Amidst nostalgic reflections on our past, Alexander notices current absurdities and contradictions in our appetites and critique of consumerism, and despite the tragedy, we have the consolation of her humor. I haven't laughed this well while reading in a long time.
-Josip Novakovich, author of Shopping for a Better Country
Brilliantly combining Shakespeare's knowing personal-political masterpiece, Hamlet, with post-911 ruminations of an edifying diversity of characters inhabiting Amenia in rural New York, novelist Victoria N. Alexander manages to do the three things that Nabokov says a good novelist must do: tell a story, inform, and enchant. Locus Amœnus, a short, sweet, sui generis blend of contemporary adult fiction and geopolitical drama, reminds us that something may be rotten in more than Denmark.
-Dorion Sagan, author of The Cosmic Apprentice
This brilliant, searing political novel deserves to be read by all of those interested in the current and future state of the United States of America. Darkly comic, wry and witty, Locus Amœnus is a genuine pastoral, a critique of the bloating and corruption of American life that draws on Hamlet for its dissection of politics, relationships, and love in post-9/11 America. From Swift to Shakespeare, the literary antecedents for Locus Amœnus are wide and varied, but the novel that emerges is wholly original and haunting in its graphic depiction of contemporary American mores and failures. I can't recommend Victoria N. Alexander's new novel enough.
-Oona Frawley, author of Flight
A tale of dark political corruption, betrayal and a through the looking-glass world where you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, Locus Amœnus is also a fiercely funny romp by a talented writer.
-Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor
Alexander's Locus Amœnus is a biting, witty, and ultimately touching window on modern American life. She evokes the wit and depth of the best of Kingsolver and high satire and earnest social exploration of Pynchon or Delillo. Her experiences bridging the worlds of rural and urban northeastern America provide those of us with experience of both a welcomed bit of nostalgia, longing, familiarity, and a sense of loss. This story is to be savored, and hopefully re-read in certain existential moods.
-David Koepsell, author of Reboot World
192 pages, Audiobook
First published June 12, 2015
1 person is currently reading
232 people want to read
About the author
Victoria N. Alexander
8 books22 followersVictoria N. Alexander, Ph.D. is a novelist, philosopher of science and co-founder of the Dactyl Foundation in NYC. Her favorite authors are Vladimir Nabokov and Stanislaw Lem, and she lives on a small sheep farm upstate with her husband and son. Alexander's fiction is published by The Permanent Press. Her nonfiction is published by Emergent Publications.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 5, 2015
A 9/11 widow and her son find sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, but something is rotten in the state of the States as our despairing narrator, the son, describes the incursion into their idyll of a second husband, whose arrival only serves to exacerbate the boy’s spiraling estrangement—from his childhood sweetheart, from the stories he has told himself about his father's death, and eventually from self, sense and sanity. The widow is Gertrude, the son Hamlet, the unwelcome stepfather Claudius, the childhood sweetheart Ophelia. Yes, Victoria Alexander aims high and, on the whole, hits her target.
Oddly enough though, the preface to the novel actually put me in mind of another, no less illustrious model. Citing personal experience of local politics, Alexander says the state of the nation is such that "I groan at the prospect of taking on this subject, with which I would much rather have nothing to do," irresistibly bringing to mind Bartleby the Scrivener's mordant, "I'd prefer not to". Happily, Alexander succumbs and tackles not just one subject, the complacency and conformity that cripple American life, but many more, too, ranging from the meta-conspiracy that keeps its citizens mired in lard, consumerism, debt, populism, patriotism, and jealously guarded ignorance, to the more closely focused conspiracies of 9/11 'truthers'.
The first part of the novel effectively sets the scene, evoking the aching void of grief felt by the bereaved as well as the pastoral paradise the refugees create in their flight from misery and modernity. It also establishes the theme of intrusion that runs throughout the book, because Gertrude and Hamlet, the one a liberal do-gooder, the other a wise-cracking wise young head, old beyond his years, are outsiders in rural America and the locals, narrow of mind and wide of girth, don't take kindly to Gertrude's well-meaning attempts to educate them in the ways of healthy eating, healthy living, and healthy thinking.
This is the funniest section of the book as Alexander mercilessly pins down (no small task in the United Starch of America) the rednecks who refuse to be anything other than what they are and what their government wants them to be. She has some cracking one-liners, the narrator describing his obese neighbors as looking "like a bloated tick", "walking himself across the floor as if he were a refrigerator" and telling another character, "You’re obviously not from around here. Your arms hang at right angles to the floor.” However, the scorn never quite tips into total contempt, and Alexander is all too aware of the sad, limited lives imposed upon these sad, limited people:
"The locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don’t need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these Neo Uncle Toms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content."
Reading that, you'll probably understand why I found myself thinking that in some ways LOCUS AMOENUS is a book addressed to the rest of the world rather than America, saying things most Americans won't want to hear but which the rest of the world is all too happy to hear. Alexander's Hamlet is an interloper, a stranger in this strange land, dislocated in time and place, a boy brought up in books, for whom storytelling is more natural than human interaction (he was the one who told his Dad stories, not the other way round), despising both the specious diversions of modernity and the hicks that surround him. He describes himself as "an experiment. Some may claim 'gone awry' . . . I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year’s weather predictions."
But Hamlet is not the only interloper because LOCUS AMOENUS is a book peopled by interlopers: urbanites interloping on the countryside, the new husband interloping on the pastoral idyll of mother and son, collective emotion masquerading as catharsis interloping on private grief, xenophobia interloping on a nation built by displaced underdogs, disillusionment and soma interloping on young love, a renegade teacher interloping on what the powers-that-be deem to be truth, the United States' army interloping on other people's countries, above all vested interests and a covert tendency toward fascism interloping on everything that American democracy promised and failed to be.
Initially, the archaic names can seem intrusive and distracting (Gertrude, OK, but Polonius? Hamlet? Laertes?), leaving one with a sense that the Shakespearian model would have worked better as a hidden structuring device rather than an overt template. However, the parallels are handled deftly and it does lend a sense of foreboding, since we know all too well what's going to happen to these people. Moreover, as the dark comedy shades into something darker still, there's a dreadful fascination as we wonder, "How's she going to pull off that particular scene then?"
It should be emphasized, it's not all darkness. The humor, which is premised more on language than character or situation, coats many a bitter pill: "it was pointless, we realized, for me to go to school, if the objective was to receive an education"; Gertrude and Hamlet were "so condescending our backs hurt"; the chief villain of the piece has a "smile (that) is the expression of someone carrying heavy furniture" (she’s particularly good on this sort of imagery: visual, evocative, concise, and very funny). There is also a touching account of childhood romance, while the wit and insights (no matter how excoriating) suggest dumbing down has not totally homogenized the nation, and there is a nice paean to an alternative rural America, saner and more functional, pieced together by the marginals, hippies, dropouts and alternative lifestylers, people for whom Emerson is not the first name in a dimly remembered prog-rock band and who don't mistake Thoreau for some dodgy sounding foreigner.
By the same token, although the book has a distinct political agenda and a clear sense of who is right and who is wrong in America, the satire is even handed. Despite or perhaps because she is probably a part of it, Alexander neatly skewers the processes of gentrification brought about by liberal, educated outsiders settling in the countryside, and she is painfully funny on Gertrude's painfully labored attempts to improve her new neighbors, blissfully unaware that nobody takes kindly to being improved.
The author is also careful to present alternative arguments to her central theses, both on the micro level and the macro. The Claudius figure, who has "a PhD in engineering, (but) . . . a negative degree of knowledge about humanity", is a bureaucratic 9/11 investigator with a talent for stating the totally obvious at great length, a talent that served him well in his job, but he is also a boring unimaginative man crushed by boring unimaginative and above all meaningless work. Likewise, the townspeople are not just dimwitted oafs, they are also real people with real problems, muddling through as best they can in a world beyond reckoning. And when the 9/11 conspiracy comes to the fore, a conspiracy the denouement implies is real, the alternative arguments for the official story are clearly and convincingly rehearsed.
Hamlet's long dark night of the soul, when he is apparently in possession of evidence to support the conspiracy theory and is going off his head, is well done and rendered entirely plausible. In a topsy-turvy world where even Catch-22 has been inverted and the irrational reigns supreme, a world where anyone who thinks or (worse) asks questions is put on medication, it seems eminently reasonable that he should elect to 'go' mad. Needless to say, it all ends badly, and the deus ex machina is no generous Fortinbras but a homicidal moron. The implications are bleak, but along the way there is much to entertain and enlighten. Indeed, for me the real pleasure in this book, what lingers, is not so much the plot, still less the conspiracy, but the portraits of people, places, communities, and relationships. For a novel based on Shakespeare, that's about right: big ideas anchored in human lives.
Oddly enough though, the preface to the novel actually put me in mind of another, no less illustrious model. Citing personal experience of local politics, Alexander says the state of the nation is such that "I groan at the prospect of taking on this subject, with which I would much rather have nothing to do," irresistibly bringing to mind Bartleby the Scrivener's mordant, "I'd prefer not to". Happily, Alexander succumbs and tackles not just one subject, the complacency and conformity that cripple American life, but many more, too, ranging from the meta-conspiracy that keeps its citizens mired in lard, consumerism, debt, populism, patriotism, and jealously guarded ignorance, to the more closely focused conspiracies of 9/11 'truthers'.
The first part of the novel effectively sets the scene, evoking the aching void of grief felt by the bereaved as well as the pastoral paradise the refugees create in their flight from misery and modernity. It also establishes the theme of intrusion that runs throughout the book, because Gertrude and Hamlet, the one a liberal do-gooder, the other a wise-cracking wise young head, old beyond his years, are outsiders in rural America and the locals, narrow of mind and wide of girth, don't take kindly to Gertrude's well-meaning attempts to educate them in the ways of healthy eating, healthy living, and healthy thinking.
This is the funniest section of the book as Alexander mercilessly pins down (no small task in the United Starch of America) the rednecks who refuse to be anything other than what they are and what their government wants them to be. She has some cracking one-liners, the narrator describing his obese neighbors as looking "like a bloated tick", "walking himself across the floor as if he were a refrigerator" and telling another character, "You’re obviously not from around here. Your arms hang at right angles to the floor.” However, the scorn never quite tips into total contempt, and Alexander is all too aware of the sad, limited lives imposed upon these sad, limited people:
"The locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don’t need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these Neo Uncle Toms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content."
Reading that, you'll probably understand why I found myself thinking that in some ways LOCUS AMOENUS is a book addressed to the rest of the world rather than America, saying things most Americans won't want to hear but which the rest of the world is all too happy to hear. Alexander's Hamlet is an interloper, a stranger in this strange land, dislocated in time and place, a boy brought up in books, for whom storytelling is more natural than human interaction (he was the one who told his Dad stories, not the other way round), despising both the specious diversions of modernity and the hicks that surround him. He describes himself as "an experiment. Some may claim 'gone awry' . . . I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year’s weather predictions."
But Hamlet is not the only interloper because LOCUS AMOENUS is a book peopled by interlopers: urbanites interloping on the countryside, the new husband interloping on the pastoral idyll of mother and son, collective emotion masquerading as catharsis interloping on private grief, xenophobia interloping on a nation built by displaced underdogs, disillusionment and soma interloping on young love, a renegade teacher interloping on what the powers-that-be deem to be truth, the United States' army interloping on other people's countries, above all vested interests and a covert tendency toward fascism interloping on everything that American democracy promised and failed to be.
Initially, the archaic names can seem intrusive and distracting (Gertrude, OK, but Polonius? Hamlet? Laertes?), leaving one with a sense that the Shakespearian model would have worked better as a hidden structuring device rather than an overt template. However, the parallels are handled deftly and it does lend a sense of foreboding, since we know all too well what's going to happen to these people. Moreover, as the dark comedy shades into something darker still, there's a dreadful fascination as we wonder, "How's she going to pull off that particular scene then?"
It should be emphasized, it's not all darkness. The humor, which is premised more on language than character or situation, coats many a bitter pill: "it was pointless, we realized, for me to go to school, if the objective was to receive an education"; Gertrude and Hamlet were "so condescending our backs hurt"; the chief villain of the piece has a "smile (that) is the expression of someone carrying heavy furniture" (she’s particularly good on this sort of imagery: visual, evocative, concise, and very funny). There is also a touching account of childhood romance, while the wit and insights (no matter how excoriating) suggest dumbing down has not totally homogenized the nation, and there is a nice paean to an alternative rural America, saner and more functional, pieced together by the marginals, hippies, dropouts and alternative lifestylers, people for whom Emerson is not the first name in a dimly remembered prog-rock band and who don't mistake Thoreau for some dodgy sounding foreigner.
By the same token, although the book has a distinct political agenda and a clear sense of who is right and who is wrong in America, the satire is even handed. Despite or perhaps because she is probably a part of it, Alexander neatly skewers the processes of gentrification brought about by liberal, educated outsiders settling in the countryside, and she is painfully funny on Gertrude's painfully labored attempts to improve her new neighbors, blissfully unaware that nobody takes kindly to being improved.
The author is also careful to present alternative arguments to her central theses, both on the micro level and the macro. The Claudius figure, who has "a PhD in engineering, (but) . . . a negative degree of knowledge about humanity", is a bureaucratic 9/11 investigator with a talent for stating the totally obvious at great length, a talent that served him well in his job, but he is also a boring unimaginative man crushed by boring unimaginative and above all meaningless work. Likewise, the townspeople are not just dimwitted oafs, they are also real people with real problems, muddling through as best they can in a world beyond reckoning. And when the 9/11 conspiracy comes to the fore, a conspiracy the denouement implies is real, the alternative arguments for the official story are clearly and convincingly rehearsed.
Hamlet's long dark night of the soul, when he is apparently in possession of evidence to support the conspiracy theory and is going off his head, is well done and rendered entirely plausible. In a topsy-turvy world where even Catch-22 has been inverted and the irrational reigns supreme, a world where anyone who thinks or (worse) asks questions is put on medication, it seems eminently reasonable that he should elect to 'go' mad. Needless to say, it all ends badly, and the deus ex machina is no generous Fortinbras but a homicidal moron. The implications are bleak, but along the way there is much to entertain and enlighten. Indeed, for me the real pleasure in this book, what lingers, is not so much the plot, still less the conspiracy, but the portraits of people, places, communities, and relationships. For a novel based on Shakespeare, that's about right: big ideas anchored in human lives.
April 4, 2015
Imagine Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, written from the point of view of an American teen. Imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in post 9/11 America. Then cross the science of good health with the politics of consumerism, add a pinch of conspiracy theory, follow some sheep, and you’ll have a pretty fair picture of Victoria N. Alexander’s Locus Amoenus.
With names changed to protect, 9/11 and his father’s death have precipitated young Hamlet and his mother’s relocation from big city to small town America. There they struggle to fit in, while city visitors are decried as “citiots.” An interest in healthy food and lifestyle makes these new country-dwellers seriously suspect, while local children overeat, overindulge in inactivity, and overly follow the edicts of internet and television like helpless sheep. Meanwhile Hamlet-the-shepherd ends up homeschooled and very well-schooled in the ways of his mother’s flock—a problem perhaps if the plan is to eat meat.
Hamlet’s voice carries the cruel dismissal of an awkward teen, making his humor more serious and sharp than might be expected at times in this dark tragi-comedy. But Hamlet’s relationships are convincingly youthful and strong. And his fury at his mother’s impending remarriage is wholly believable, even if his descent into madness might be as pretended as his name. Then comes the final straw, in an Act where conspiracy theories dominate the plot, and dire consequences seem almost sure to ensue.
Yes, the novel’s divided into Acts, just like Hamlet the play. Yes, all characters are present and accounted for, and perfectly named. And yes, the plot’s parallels are not hard to see. But the story’s darkly humorous, harshly compelling, and cruelly relentless, even when the global argument feels wrong. Hamlet’s personal grief is subsumed by the flocks who want to own him; the leader is led; the sheep loses its way, and no one is left to make sacrifice worthwhile.
The ending promises a pancake supper night, with expected obesity. But whatever you do, don’t turn to that last page until the story’s done. There's a sting in this tail.
Disclosure: I was given a free bound galley by the publisher and I offer my honest review.
With names changed to protect, 9/11 and his father’s death have precipitated young Hamlet and his mother’s relocation from big city to small town America. There they struggle to fit in, while city visitors are decried as “citiots.” An interest in healthy food and lifestyle makes these new country-dwellers seriously suspect, while local children overeat, overindulge in inactivity, and overly follow the edicts of internet and television like helpless sheep. Meanwhile Hamlet-the-shepherd ends up homeschooled and very well-schooled in the ways of his mother’s flock—a problem perhaps if the plan is to eat meat.
Hamlet’s voice carries the cruel dismissal of an awkward teen, making his humor more serious and sharp than might be expected at times in this dark tragi-comedy. But Hamlet’s relationships are convincingly youthful and strong. And his fury at his mother’s impending remarriage is wholly believable, even if his descent into madness might be as pretended as his name. Then comes the final straw, in an Act where conspiracy theories dominate the plot, and dire consequences seem almost sure to ensue.
Yes, the novel’s divided into Acts, just like Hamlet the play. Yes, all characters are present and accounted for, and perfectly named. And yes, the plot’s parallels are not hard to see. But the story’s darkly humorous, harshly compelling, and cruelly relentless, even when the global argument feels wrong. Hamlet’s personal grief is subsumed by the flocks who want to own him; the leader is led; the sheep loses its way, and no one is left to make sacrifice worthwhile.
The ending promises a pancake supper night, with expected obesity. But whatever you do, don’t turn to that last page until the story’s done. There's a sting in this tail.
Disclosure: I was given a free bound galley by the publisher and I offer my honest review.
June 14, 2015
I won this book on goodreads and I didn't know what to expect from a dark comedy. I am glad I won this book because I found another genre I like to read. I had to look up what Locus Amoenus means :) I was laughing at some points, confused at some points, sad at some points. But it was all very entertaining!
April 1, 2015
Alexander portrays small town America—fraught with ignorance, senseless bureaucracy, economic disparity, conspiracy theories, and obesity—with extraordinary gallows humor.
December 16, 2015
I did not love this novel - but then why would I? An under-cultured nuts-and-bolts architect from Texas, I came into possession of this (very small) adaptation of Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” purely through the serendipity of a coffee house on a rainy night. The works of William Shakespeare were not featured curriculum items at Texas Tech during my collegial youth, so very much of Alexander's wit and (perhaps even) classical genius, were, for me, seeds sewn on a stony path.
About halfway through the play, the good doctor's (very big) idea began to open for me. In the end, I found myself nearly in tears and then on the very last page – CODA: the kick in the gut that left me gasping.
I read it again to reconsider; this time not as entertainment but, if you will, seeing for the first time the gifts of the mythic Athena to the fearless but naïve Perseus: the cape of night, her shield, sword, and Mercury's whispered counsel to approach the Gorgon only in reflection. The Greeks knew something about speaking truth to power without guile. Anyway - another stony hero would only clutter the old girl’s living room and at this writing she still maintains her head.
Locus Amoenus (a beautiful place) is nothing less than an inverse Ground Zero for the perpetrators of America’s 911. It’s a safe place for sheeple across the fruited plain to gather, ruminate their collective circumstance, and the plans their treacherous shepherds might have for their immediate future.
p135, "Violence? Not this time, I'm afraid. The mob seems to have subverted its urge, its right, to be angry. There is something more powerful. The criminals know we know. They know we know they know. It's a standoff, an intellectual siege. We wait and we mind what we eat."
The final analysis from a caffeinated Texas clodhopper: Three Cheers for Victoria Alexander!
About halfway through the play, the good doctor's (very big) idea began to open for me. In the end, I found myself nearly in tears and then on the very last page – CODA: the kick in the gut that left me gasping.
I read it again to reconsider; this time not as entertainment but, if you will, seeing for the first time the gifts of the mythic Athena to the fearless but naïve Perseus: the cape of night, her shield, sword, and Mercury's whispered counsel to approach the Gorgon only in reflection. The Greeks knew something about speaking truth to power without guile. Anyway - another stony hero would only clutter the old girl’s living room and at this writing she still maintains her head.
Locus Amoenus (a beautiful place) is nothing less than an inverse Ground Zero for the perpetrators of America’s 911. It’s a safe place for sheeple across the fruited plain to gather, ruminate their collective circumstance, and the plans their treacherous shepherds might have for their immediate future.
p135, "Violence? Not this time, I'm afraid. The mob seems to have subverted its urge, its right, to be angry. There is something more powerful. The criminals know we know. They know we know they know. It's a standoff, an intellectual siege. We wait and we mind what we eat."
The final analysis from a caffeinated Texas clodhopper: Three Cheers for Victoria Alexander!
February 1, 2019
I won this preview edition from Goodreads.
Hamlet and his 9/11 widowed mother, Gertrude, relocate from Brooklyn to a small community in upstate New York. Her enthusiasm for organic and the natural collides with the habits of the carbohydrate consuming grossly overweight population. I am sure Shakespeare would enjoy this modern rendition of his tragedy, although parts are laugh out loud funny. Without some knowledge of the play, and the names she has chosen for the characters, it might not be as interesting. I found it to be pretty entertaining.
Hamlet and his 9/11 widowed mother, Gertrude, relocate from Brooklyn to a small community in upstate New York. Her enthusiasm for organic and the natural collides with the habits of the carbohydrate consuming grossly overweight population. I am sure Shakespeare would enjoy this modern rendition of his tragedy, although parts are laugh out loud funny. Without some knowledge of the play, and the names she has chosen for the characters, it might not be as interesting. I found it to be pretty entertaining.
June 20, 2015
The 911 explanation was a different and frightening fiction. Locus Aoenus also viewed life in a small town in upstate New York with appropriate satire. The characterization of each member in the book really hit home. The book instilled good hearty laughs and sobs.
Read
March 4, 2020Good book, leaves a lot of questions to ending.
I would suggest reading and discussing, jaw dropping and good details to characters.
This would make a good movie in my opinion.
I would suggest reading and discussing, jaw dropping and good details to characters.
This would make a good movie in my opinion.
January 21, 2016
A young man tries to deal with conspiracy theories and the reality of how politics and governance work, having been brought up in a very sheltered, uninformed, but 'healthy' home. Written as a sort of retelling of Hamlet, but set in a small town in Massachusetts, Hamlet and his mother Gertrude create a new life for themselves after Gertrude's husband is killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack. 8 years later Hamlet is unwilling to let his mom move on and remarry, and his dislike for Claudius, her new husband, becomes vicious once Hamlet runs into his old science teacher, Horatio, who has become an embittered conspiracy theorist.
There is plenty to discuss and to think about in this short novel, and it actually does sort of work as a modern take on Hamlet, though it brings out Hamlet's irrational and naive side. Hamlet is woefully ill equipped to deal with the conflicting information offered to him concerning 9/11, having spent all his life not paying attention to the news. He also is no expert in any of what he is trying to understand, but he doesn't have the maturity to recognize that all his information is equally second hand. Instead of making his family and friends wake up to the truth he thinks he's discovered, he simply destroys the lives of everyone close to him. There are other ways to read this book, too, of course.
I was a bit distracted from actually getting into the story by the heavy-handed application of Shakespeare's Hamlet to the story the author is telling. Even keeping in mind that this book is satire and a dark comedy of sorts, the Hamlet layer to this story got in the way of the storytelling more than I would have wished. There aren't really any great female roles in Hamlet that aren't walked all over by the men in the story, so while I wasn't thrilled with how Gertrude and Ophelia were portrayed in this book, they were reasonable characters given what the author was doing. I wanted Gertrude to put her son in his place a bit more about his assumption that she should stay single for the rest of her life- 8 years seems like quite a long time to wait before marrying and moving on. The way she and Polonius allowed Hamlet to carry on with Ophelia while Ophelia was just an 8yr-old kid was also a bit creepy, though if all the characters are meant to be a bit off, it works. The only spot where I really couldn't suspend disbelief was where Hamlet is being searched before a flight, while disguised as a woman. Surely any woman doing a body-search of a man dressed as a woman would notice that the subject is in fact male.
On the whole, this book was pretty good, but there were too many bits that bugged me to give it a full 5 stars. The way Hamlet is written in this book reminded me very much of typical YA genre storytelling, so perhaps readers who stick to that genre will enjoy it enough not to notice the bits that bugged me.
I won my copy of this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
There is plenty to discuss and to think about in this short novel, and it actually does sort of work as a modern take on Hamlet, though it brings out Hamlet's irrational and naive side. Hamlet is woefully ill equipped to deal with the conflicting information offered to him concerning 9/11, having spent all his life not paying attention to the news. He also is no expert in any of what he is trying to understand, but he doesn't have the maturity to recognize that all his information is equally second hand. Instead of making his family and friends wake up to the truth he thinks he's discovered, he simply destroys the lives of everyone close to him. There are other ways to read this book, too, of course.
I was a bit distracted from actually getting into the story by the heavy-handed application of Shakespeare's Hamlet to the story the author is telling. Even keeping in mind that this book is satire and a dark comedy of sorts, the Hamlet layer to this story got in the way of the storytelling more than I would have wished. There aren't really any great female roles in Hamlet that aren't walked all over by the men in the story, so while I wasn't thrilled with how Gertrude and Ophelia were portrayed in this book, they were reasonable characters given what the author was doing. I wanted Gertrude to put her son in his place a bit more about his assumption that she should stay single for the rest of her life- 8 years seems like quite a long time to wait before marrying and moving on. The way she and Polonius allowed Hamlet to carry on with Ophelia while Ophelia was just an 8yr-old kid was also a bit creepy, though if all the characters are meant to be a bit off, it works. The only spot where I really couldn't suspend disbelief was where Hamlet is being searched before a flight, while disguised as a woman. Surely any woman doing a body-search of a man dressed as a woman would notice that the subject is in fact male.
On the whole, this book was pretty good, but there were too many bits that bugged me to give it a full 5 stars. The way Hamlet is written in this book reminded me very much of typical YA genre storytelling, so perhaps readers who stick to that genre will enjoy it enough not to notice the bits that bugged me.
I won my copy of this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
September 12, 2015
Locus Amœnus is a thoroughly clever Young Adult novel loosely based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. When Hamlet is told by an old friend Horatio that 9/11 was covered up, with help from his new stepfather, he becomes depressed and wants to set things straight.
First off, I loved it! Full of snappy wit and a British sense of humor. Locus Amœnus will appeal to young adult readers because of its young protagonist vs. the World theme, but this time, dragons and magic are not necessary to paint a real world dystopia. Obesity, poor education, and corrupt government all contribute to Hamlet's world.
In terms of style, I am reminded of Pseudonymous Bosch (minus the asterisks containing page-long tangents). Alexander is much more poetic that Bosch, and not as crazy, but they both have the same fast and cunning sort of humor. John Green comes to mind as well. When Alexander describes a wellness committee meeting, with the morbidly obese school nutritionist, I was reminded of when Green describes a cancer support group, with Patrick, the group leader who insists on singing songs. Both writers use satire well. John Green is slightly mellower, though.
Unfortunately, some of Alexander's awesome is lost on other reviewers, who take the parodic but tragic ending as real. An article at the end reports This reminds me of the ending of Pseudonymous Bosch's Bad Magic where we a given a hint that the narrator is in fact one of the main characters.
Loved it!
First off, I loved it! Full of snappy wit and a British sense of humor. Locus Amœnus will appeal to young adult readers because of its young protagonist vs. the World theme, but this time, dragons and magic are not necessary to paint a real world dystopia. Obesity, poor education, and corrupt government all contribute to Hamlet's world.
In terms of style, I am reminded of Pseudonymous Bosch (minus the asterisks containing page-long tangents). Alexander is much more poetic that Bosch, and not as crazy, but they both have the same fast and cunning sort of humor. John Green comes to mind as well. When Alexander describes a wellness committee meeting, with the morbidly obese school nutritionist, I was reminded of when Green describes a cancer support group, with Patrick, the group leader who insists on singing songs. Both writers use satire well. John Green is slightly mellower, though.
Unfortunately, some of Alexander's awesome is lost on other reviewers, who take the parodic but tragic ending as real. An article at the end reports This reminds me of the ending of Pseudonymous Bosch's Bad Magic where we a given a hint that the narrator is in fact one of the main characters.
Loved it!
Read
January 5, 2016Thank you Victoria for such a marvel of technique.
I feel the urge to read Hamlet. I somehow neglected that in my education or have forgotten having read it .All thru Locus Amoenus I kept thinking I should reread Hamlet first. I kept reading to the end and I'm a better man for it.If this is for young adults, I must be immature.
This is a jewel of a book by Victoria N. Alexander that must be read slowly. She concentrates so much information with a smoothly flowing style .
I feel the urge to read Hamlet. I somehow neglected that in my education or have forgotten having read it .All thru Locus Amoenus I kept thinking I should reread Hamlet first. I kept reading to the end and I'm a better man for it.If this is for young adults, I must be immature.
This is a jewel of a book by Victoria N. Alexander that must be read slowly. She concentrates so much information with a smoothly flowing style .
August 9, 2015
Great read. Funny and witty.
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