Robert Coover's Fable Land discussion

Scheduled for March of 2014 from Dzanc Books.
A mammoth sequel to his first novel ;
1100+ pages of CooverCooverCoover!

amazon's listing April 1 (!) for release. That's little more than a month to clear your reading list. Wrath!

"Your order of "The Brunist Day of Wrath" has shipped!"

Oh happy day!

Congratulations!

Me;I wimped out on the hardcover and pre-ordered the ebook version.

Coover reading, April 1 @ Brown U.

http://www.providencejournal.com/feat...

Anyone else get started on this? It's a nice light piece of work ; should be no intimdation factor ;; except for the rather large crowd of characters which constitutes West Condon.

Dzanc has made available ::

"The Bad News: The Litany of Saint Bob" by James Tierney, orginally published in Golden Handcuffs Review #18.
http://www.dzancbooks.org/blog/2014/3...

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Anyone else get started on this? It's a nice light piece of work ; should be no intimdation factor ;; except for the rather large crowd of characters which constitutes West Condon.



Erm. no... I still haven't read the first Brunist book. That's gotta be next on my list. :)

Amy wrote: "Erm. no... I still haven't read the first Brunist book. That's gotta be next on my list. :) "

Read that thing from Tierney I just posted. You won't wait any longer.... ; )

So the review in the Wall Street Journal is just really mundane and boring and not worth your time reading ::

"Book Review: 'The Brunist Day of Wrath' by Robert Coover" reviewed by Howard Schneider.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/S...

He says the following ::

"'The Brunist Day of Wrath has its flaws: Mr. Coover has miscalculated by keeping the time, locale and Zeitgeist of his book vague. I think it takes place in the Midwest; I think its story occurs in the late 1960s or early '70s. This uncertainty is frustrating. And there are no blacks or Jews in West Condon, and events in the outside world never impinge on the town: This seems unlikely."

Now I know that the word "flaws" is a popular word to use when "critiquing" a novel, but it usually causes me to tune out the "criticisms" being made. It functions for me as a negative version of my magic words. "Flaws" in a novel! Who woulda thunk it! Bruno save us!

In this case, what are identified as "flaws" is just the simple fact that Bob did not write the novel that the reviewer wanted him to write ; and therefore it follows that this person should not have reviewed the novel which Bob did write. The question isn't Should there be blacks and Jews in a novel about West Condon ; but rather Why are there no blacks or Jews in West Condon?

Bob is reading at Brown University tonight. Also, a short interview ::

"Robert Coover: ‘Where it takes me, I have to go’"
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/...

Review at numero cinq by Natalie Helberg, "Dream Eaters of the Apocalypse: A Review of Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath" ::

http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/04...

"Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath is a boisterous, bloody, jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring—for any writer, humbling—sometimes painfully, but always expertly, protracted ride. Countless characters and their countless voices well up out of its thousand pages, mingling as subplots crisscross and ramify: Cultists clash with the local and power-laden in a high-profile scrimmage for property; cult benefactors drain joint bank-accounts, screwing local, power-laden husbands out of their underpinning monies; skeptics balk, hoot, and forewarn; believers pray, persist together, at odds, or else, defecting, wail for reckoning; trailer-brats rapture cats; fathers disown sons and sons abandon fathers; signs are deciphered, then, ad hoc, re-deciphered; God is named, variously; musically-inclined yokels hit it big; an aspiring saint is gang-raped; demons are conceived, and, on a rooftop in the midst of a bloodbath to end bloodbaths, a murderous, evangelical biker is volatized by choppers."


Also, someone (same person who built the Women & Men page) is building a wikipedia entry for Wrath :: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brun...

Video of Coover reading at The Center For Fiction, March 27, 2014 ::
http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/...

Also, another review. By Michael Sheehan. ::
http://therumpus.net/2014/04/the-brun...

NYT review by Stephen J. Burn (I think that's the same Burn) ::

"Apocalypse Again"

(paywall'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/boo...

"Yet despite this vast range of reference and the novel’s historical setting, “The Brunist Day of Wrath” is, at heart, an indictment of America’s current marriage of religion and politics. In an interview several years ago, Coover explained that he was compelled to return to the Brunists by “the election of young Bush and the rise of the fundamentalists.” The novel’s vast networked vision of the way biblical stories lead us to violence and political subterfuge urgently prods the reader to share Sally’s late recognition that stories are the “most dangerous things there are.”

Maybe this link is better for the Burn review of Wrath ::
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/boo...
(I can't pretend to understand the NYT paywall system)

YouTube of Coover reading "The Frog Prince" and excerpts from "The Brunist Day of Wrath."

(Sorry if this has already been posted up somewhere in the forum).

http://youtu.be/343jB6i_zCk

A Swedish review.

"Vredens dag för kristendomen: Småstad på dekis i Robert Coovers USA"
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokr...

Google translator produces a readable text, so I'll paste that in brackets to save you time ::

(view spoiler)[
"Wrath of God for Christianity: Small town on the decadence of Robert Coovers USA"

Religious fundamentalism is an old phenomenon that has characterized the West well into the modern era. Both Catholicism to Protestantism, and all the variations in between that arose from the Reformation, has claimed the truth with the Bible as a guide, which has cost many people their lives. When we talk about Islamic fundamentalism, we tend to forget the atrocities that have been carried out in the name of Christianity. It is also mainly Islamic fundamentalism that has become the subject of a novelist; Orhan Pamuk's Snow, Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist or Mohsin Hamid The Reluctant Fundamentalist - all published in the early 2000s decade. But where is the novel that turns things around and the eyes of Western, particularly American, hard-line Christian vision?



The question is rhetorical, because there is now a rare incisive, exciting, entertaining and powerful novel on the subject; Robert Coovers 1000-page novel The downfall Brunist Day of Wrath - Wrath of God according to Brown realists.

But we need to back off a little. Coover debuted in 1966 with the Darwin-sounding title of The Origin of the Brunists, which is about how a mining accident in the small sydstatsstaden West Condon leads to how one of the survivors, Catholic Giovanni Bruno, becomes the object of a cult. The cult will in time become a church that interprets it in the nearest apatiske Bruno's peculiar message that Judgment Day is imminent. The whole town pulled into the looming disaster that ends with Giovanni's sister Marcella killed when brown lard together in a storm on a mountain to await the Ascension.



Now, half a century and some 25 novels and collections of short stories later, Coover has come up with a sequel. West Condon five years later, and brown realists are back. The situation is much more serious. West Condon is a city of decadence. Unemployment is widespread, downtown shops again either beaten or threatened with bankruptcy, the young people drinking cheap booze and the old brown realists, as after the disaster five years earlier has remained passive, is slowly but surely re-emerge. A throng of people in the United States represents a microformat; This is the bank manager and the mayor, shop owners and the unemployed, young people who tinkers with cars or go to college and of course representatives from a variety of churches, including Abner Baxter, who becomes increasingly fundamentalist leader of the resurrected brown realists.



Unlike Coovers other writings, characterized by genre games, satire and rampant criticism of American myths (The Public Burning is his most famous, if the execution of the Rosenbergs, with Richard Nixon as the novel's narrator), so is The Brunist Day of Wrath a true courtly romance in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. Coover writes with absolute loyalty to the different persons, be they more or less insane, murderers and rapists, new-age ladies or prophets who believe that Jesus Christ has taken place in their bodies. Bible-citations flows but with loyalty follows that Coover shows how nobody succeeds see something from someone else's perspective. Some real negotiation is not possible and the increasingly infected the atmosphere has the same relentless development that in a Greek tragedy - but in epic format.



The only exception in this extensive gallery of the young Sally Elliott, Coovers alter ego, who sees through every religious madness. She wears T-shirts with lyrics like "Support Atheism: a non-prophet organization" and is quick witted and analytical. The novel also ends with that she's writing a book about the disaster. But before this local Armageddon breaks loose as depicting Coover of nearly 200 pages how the world ends. Occasional gunshots and burglary leads to mutual rearmament, a motocykelgäng with Christian tattoos sees violence as a problem and when the city's powerful banker Cavanaugh tries to get help from the outside of the governor, it will too late. Pure massacre is taking and who really is the most guilty is svårutrett. So it is a downfall drama without much difficulty be translated in political-religious conflicts in much larger scale.



There is also a stylistic irony. Coover might be loyal to his people, but in style - long, elegant and often funny worded statements - there is often a dramatic irony that is folded to the reader. We can see the folly, stupidity and bigotry, but it is not those who act in the novel. So it is that in which international conflict any where religion is used as a motive. The reader of Coovers novel is as powerless as reality mediator or intellectuals who seek solutions. Same thing with entertainment, this is reserved for the reader.

(hide spoiler)]

got the day it came out, but have not read b/c so much more important stuff i haven't yet. loved origin, mostly i think b/c i came to it from his more to most meta/pomo/weirderist--fiction, at least, b/c i haven't read any plays/scripts/&c.--stuff, but also b/c it's so damn good. found it originally in pocket pb, which gives it the appearance, both of the pockets i own at least, of being just another big, kooky 60's/70's novel about the end of the world, when it's really a very subtle (not the book so much) wolf between a sheep's covers. i often had to pause & reread things that would make me giggle imagining folks reading w/ zero context re: coover; context, of course, which didn't exist yet as it was his first published book. so when i read it some forty-five years later, on the heels of charlie in the house of rue, spanking the maid & ghost town (& having read several other things previously), it was only so much context that allowed me to enjoy it that way; or, put differently, t'warn't b/c i'm smart or nothing.

question re: howard schneider review (only read quote from nathan), i thought brunist day was perfectly clear re: setting? is it not 5-10 years later? still in west condon? did schneider not read origin? am i gonna just read the review instead of continuing to ask questions it would likely answer?

yes. yes, i am