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Bloomsbury USA
July 2012
On Sale: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 1608198219 EAN: 9781608198214 Kindle: B009GJQK2I Paperback / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction Literary
Stuck in a hospital and heavily medicated, Harry Chapman
doesn’t just hear the doctors, nurses, and other patients.
Is that the voice of his mother, acerbic and disappointed in
him as ever? Perhaps her presence would be understandable
enough, but what is Pip from Great Expectations doing in his
hospital room? More and more voices join the chorus: friends
from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry.
His father, fighting in World War I. Babar and Céleste, who
dances with Fred Astaire. Jane Austen’s Emma. Harry’s aunt
Rose, "a stranger to moodiness." A man who wants to sell
Harry T. S. Eliot’s teeth. And, of course, an old friend who
turns up at Harry’s bedside principally to rehearse the
litany of his own ailments. Slowly, endearingly, the life of Harry Chapman coalesces
before our eyes, through voices real and imagined. Written
with a gentle, effortless generosity, full of delicate
observation, Chapman’s Odyssey is the work of a master; a
superbly rendered act of storytelling and ventriloquism that
is stinging, witty, deeply moving, and wise by turns, but
always explores the nature of love.
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