The Lost Oasis - Softcover

Roscoe, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771075790 ISBN 13: 9780771075797

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1995

Synopsis

A telephone call from a small B.C. town awakens Richard in Sevilla with the news that his father has disappeared. His passport has been discovered in the desert, and Richard feels compelled to look for him. This will not be the first time that his father - a charismatic yet detached presence - has occasioned a difficult journey.
Greetings from the end of the world. Seven words on the back of a postcard. His father's last, from the Moroccan town where Richard begins his search. A search both backwards and forwards through time. A search that leads towards where a passport was discovered somewhere on the sand. Pulled gradually deeper into the charged atmosphere of this landscape, Richard is caught between his desire to return to his lover in Spain and the need to find out what happened to his father. What happened to them all.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Roscoe (Love Is Starving for Itself) has a smooth style, but there is a whole lot of nothing in this pleasant but ultimately vacuous novel. Richard is living in Seville with his first long-term lover, Jose, when he gets a phone call teling him that his father has disappeared. The phone call evokes an engaging retelling of Richard's family history: his parents marriage and early life in the small British Columbia town of Brale; his mother's mental illness and hospitalization; and his family's subsequent rootless journeys to Europe and Africa. Clearly, this was a strange background (the children barely remember their mother and were ignorant of the treatment she was undergoing), but Richard recalls it with a vague sense of desperation, never clearly defining what was so truly awful about it. What ensues is a somewhat heavy-handed mix of memories of life with his remote father (``Travel light, travel right'' was his motto) and details about Richard's trip to Africa in search of him. Some of this is believable, and even quite moving. Richard's descriptions of his pre-Jose relationships and their transience, for example, is quite accomplished. But much of the story that takes place in Africa is problematic because, while Roscoe is hell-bent on making Africa ``mean something,'' much of the narrative there is really just aimless looking around, a collection of episodes unconnected by any real unifying thread.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0771075790
• ISBN 13: 9780771075797
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384