What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lake
Cut off from the real world by years of grappling with intellectual abstractions, Zachary Brannagan, a young philosopher, sets out to reconnect with life at a lake, where he encounters a woman who draws him from a life of the intellect into a world of concrete physical experience. A first novel. Reprint.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published June 26, 2000
1 person is currently reading
48 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 5, 2013
1.5 stars actually, this is the rambling story of Zach, a college philosophy student who tries to commit suicide. After some therapy with Dr. Lazar, he goes on a road trip to get back his life. It is a rambling, run on diatribe of his emotions and actions especially becoming connected to The Lake, an orphanage run by Anna and filled with physically and/or emotionally discarded children particularly Samuel. If what a reader desires is to be inundated with poetic prose of run-on sentences, lack of commas between clauses, lack of conventions like quotation marks when people are speaking, and over-the-top vocabulary that will lose most readers who don't have a dictionary close at hand, then this is the (loosely labelled) novel for you. There is a story within all the meandering prose, but it is difficult to figure out. Unfortunately, this literary novel didn't impress me at all.
June 17, 2025
Poetic. Original. . Magical. Startling. Love as healing.
December 17, 2013
When poets write prose, listen up. The best know how to make language - and readers - work overtime.
Daniel Villasenor's first novel, "The Lake," can barely contain its ambition. It's a beautifully wrought novel about trying to escape the abstractions of language. That's a paradoxical challenge for a writer to tackle.
The hero of this quest is a brilliant young philosopher, one of those professional graduate students trapped in the eddy of his dissertation, subsisting on enormous intellectuality and a tiny university stipend. We meet Zach the day he can endure the harrowing emptiness of philosophical abstraction no more. He's grown self-conscious to the point of watching the sun move across the floor of his room. Thinking about thinking about thinking has driven him mad:
"When he went to lie down in the road it was early September and already the first molted leaves of the season were awash and clumped in the street rivulets and the air was woozy already with that sharp autumnal afterdark cold which feels on the summer's throat like a handheld knife chafing on a wire."
After he's arrested and admitted to a psychiatric ward, Zach meets an irreverent doctor who takes a personal interest in his case. When he chooses to take patients, which is increasingly rare, Dr. Lazar still practices that old-fashioned brand of psychology now retired by a host of more profitable psychotropic drugs.
For two months, he comes to Zach's room with a thermos of forbidden hot chocolate and listens to the young man talk about Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Finally, one night, he cuts him off midsentence and tells him to shut up.
"You are not sick," he yells at him. "You are not a philosopher. You are dying for things. For the feel of things. Philosophy ... is your prefabricated shopping mall from which you pick a little Aristotle from this shop, a little Hume from there, some Kant in Women's Apparel, some Rousseau in Sporting Goods, and you sit
there in this little buffered eatery of your own making and adjudicate and calibrate and expiate the world's verse."
The cure he recommends is a trip to find his real parents on an Indian reservation in Arizona. "You have to coax the world back," he tells Zach as he sends him off. Travel as therapy.
This return to his origins becomes something much larger, a return to the concrete world he's abandoned with all its messy inconsistency and ineffable emotion and baffling characters.
The intensity of Zach's vision is sometimes overwhelming, like having to speed-read a thousand haiku. Even the most incidental details are carved with exquisite detail, conveying the strain of coming back into the light of ordinary life.
Villasenor drags his hero through a compelling series of strange encounters that glimmer with the potential for violence or kindness. Naive and foolish, Zach ends up penniless and badly scarred.
When someone drops him off at the Lake, a remote unlicensed sanatorium for handicapped children, he fits right in. Anna looks after her 11 charges entirely by herself. Although she's shunned by the town's conservative citizens, the guilty parents of these abandoned children make sure she has enough to get by.
Silently, Anna does her best to repair Zach's torn face, and just as timidly Zach does his best to help out around the farm. Since many of the children can't speak, theirs is largely an elemental world of inarticulate sounds and feelings.
No one could have less use for Zach's intellectual specialty than these fractured, misshapen children. But as he learns to watch them, help them, and finally love them and their caregiver, he finds that he has resources far beyond his intellect.
Villasenor comes to the novel with a poet's willingness to risk and experiment. Told in chapters that alternate among several stages of Zach's journey, "The Lake" is a raw, haunting story of rare emotional intensity. By the end, I felt both demolished and enriched. The tragedy of this novel is as redolent with beauty as its most tender moments.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/0727/p1...
Daniel Villasenor's first novel, "The Lake," can barely contain its ambition. It's a beautifully wrought novel about trying to escape the abstractions of language. That's a paradoxical challenge for a writer to tackle.
The hero of this quest is a brilliant young philosopher, one of those professional graduate students trapped in the eddy of his dissertation, subsisting on enormous intellectuality and a tiny university stipend. We meet Zach the day he can endure the harrowing emptiness of philosophical abstraction no more. He's grown self-conscious to the point of watching the sun move across the floor of his room. Thinking about thinking about thinking has driven him mad:
"When he went to lie down in the road it was early September and already the first molted leaves of the season were awash and clumped in the street rivulets and the air was woozy already with that sharp autumnal afterdark cold which feels on the summer's throat like a handheld knife chafing on a wire."
After he's arrested and admitted to a psychiatric ward, Zach meets an irreverent doctor who takes a personal interest in his case. When he chooses to take patients, which is increasingly rare, Dr. Lazar still practices that old-fashioned brand of psychology now retired by a host of more profitable psychotropic drugs.
For two months, he comes to Zach's room with a thermos of forbidden hot chocolate and listens to the young man talk about Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Finally, one night, he cuts him off midsentence and tells him to shut up.
"You are not sick," he yells at him. "You are not a philosopher. You are dying for things. For the feel of things. Philosophy ... is your prefabricated shopping mall from which you pick a little Aristotle from this shop, a little Hume from there, some Kant in Women's Apparel, some Rousseau in Sporting Goods, and you sit
there in this little buffered eatery of your own making and adjudicate and calibrate and expiate the world's verse."
The cure he recommends is a trip to find his real parents on an Indian reservation in Arizona. "You have to coax the world back," he tells Zach as he sends him off. Travel as therapy.
This return to his origins becomes something much larger, a return to the concrete world he's abandoned with all its messy inconsistency and ineffable emotion and baffling characters.
The intensity of Zach's vision is sometimes overwhelming, like having to speed-read a thousand haiku. Even the most incidental details are carved with exquisite detail, conveying the strain of coming back into the light of ordinary life.
Villasenor drags his hero through a compelling series of strange encounters that glimmer with the potential for violence or kindness. Naive and foolish, Zach ends up penniless and badly scarred.
When someone drops him off at the Lake, a remote unlicensed sanatorium for handicapped children, he fits right in. Anna looks after her 11 charges entirely by herself. Although she's shunned by the town's conservative citizens, the guilty parents of these abandoned children make sure she has enough to get by.
Silently, Anna does her best to repair Zach's torn face, and just as timidly Zach does his best to help out around the farm. Since many of the children can't speak, theirs is largely an elemental world of inarticulate sounds and feelings.
No one could have less use for Zach's intellectual specialty than these fractured, misshapen children. But as he learns to watch them, help them, and finally love them and their caregiver, he finds that he has resources far beyond his intellect.
Villasenor comes to the novel with a poet's willingness to risk and experiment. Told in chapters that alternate among several stages of Zach's journey, "The Lake" is a raw, haunting story of rare emotional intensity. By the end, I felt both demolished and enriched. The tragedy of this novel is as redolent with beauty as its most tender moments.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/0727/p1...
September 2, 2008
The thing you have to remember when reading this book is that it's a novel written by a poet. If you don't like poetry, probably not for you. I thought it was wonderful. It takes more work to get thru, mentally, than most novels, but it's still easy to become emotionally invested in the characters and the plot. Lots of personality. Amazing descriptive language. Kinda quirky- whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on your personal preference I guess.
January 17, 2010
Story line is somewhat bizarre, but I loved the economy of his descriptions and the touching anguish of the main protagonist struggling with intellectual overload. This is a book that sent me RUNNING for the dictionary - his vocabulary is astonishing. Haven't had to do that for years!
February 23, 2016
Lent to me by a friend who went to college with the write I was a tad leary but this book was music to me. As soon as I finished it I wanted to read it again. It is beautiful and haunting and you don't want to let go
April 13, 2008
Don't waste your time on this book.
June 25, 2012
If you don't like prose fiction then don't read this, or it'll go right over your head and you will not enjoy the experience- but if you do, this beautifully written piece will blow you away.
April 3, 2017
Really liked this. Tough read, be prepared to question things.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews