The Other Planet - Hardcover

Ascher-Straus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0914232932 ISBN 13: 9780914232933

Publisher: McPherson, 1988

Synopsis

Is it possible to live in the future? -- to embrace the transformations created by every new thing, and at the same time to escape the depressing discrepancy between events that only happen and those which actually might? For Valeria Florescu, the desirable pathway would lead through 'a subtly coherent twining of adventures' in a personal quest for the 'extraordinary.' But when Valeria quits her job as research chemist at a large industrial laboratory, she discovers first that uncertainty is more than a law of particle physics. Almost immediately she encounters the contradictory allures of two attractive men: Liam Lenehan, whose mad passion for order takes the curious form of repairing obsolescence; and Humberto Vilanescu, alchemical entrepreneur and impressario of futurism. Against the claustrophobic inertia of well-meaning family members, Valeria is propelled by the magnetic promise of self-realization (and bizarre encounters with the inexplicable) into adventures that send her through supercharged Manhattan parties, orgies in postmodern condos, and the decrepit wilderness of exurban slums. And then, as the ruins of reality slip behind, she journeys toward the fulfillment of the ambitious yearnings of the electronic generation. The Other Planet is a brilliant decoding of the agenda for the future, as well as an acutely penetrating observation of the present. With its compelling sensation of deja vu -- and delirious soliloquies on scientific imperialism, enforced stupidity, movies and movie stars, the nature of magic, and millennial lust -- this breakthrough novel presents an uncommon and challenging experience.

About this title

About the Author:

Since 1973 the award-winning genre-bending fiction of Ascher/Straus has been appearing widely in magazines, including Chicago Review, The Paris Review, Chelsea, Sun and Moon, Epoch and Exile. Their other books include The Menaced Assassin, Red Moon/Red Lake, 123 ABC Street, Hank Forest's Party, and Monica's Chronicle. Both Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus were born in New York City, studied at Columbia University, and live on a peninsula between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Review:

'A pretty definitive statement about the post-modern experience... The future is sparked by a mysterious stranger, Humberto Vilanescu. Rich, foreign, partly messianic and partly Mephistophelian, he's a combination of the Aga Khan, Howard Hughes and The Man Who Fell to Earth. ... This is a mysterious, absorbing, sexy and troubling reflection on these weird times, and it should be read.' -- --John Strausbaugh, City Paper

'Ascher/Straus constantly force their readers to abandon expectations. In their later work, those expectations are foiled more subtly, and within structures that resemble more traditional plots, but whose ambiguities and multiple possibilities are all the more striking for that reason. In The Other Planet, Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet, a future that one can enter now, through sheer force of will. The Other Planet examines the ways the myth of the future creates a profound disillusionment and a yearning for the impossible. It critiques that myth while harboring no nostalgia for the forms that trap characters in the present, the habits of family and full-time employment. Valeria finds herself in a traditional romantic plot, receiving attentions from two radically different suitors. There's a nice, inarticulate working-class guy who's desperately in love with her versus a creepy evil genius-entrepreneur-rapist, Humberto Vilanescu, who offers her a part in the vague and improbable 'future' as an escape from the relentlessly barren present. 'We long for life to be like a waking dream, an adventure whose coherence, whose 'plot' provides something akin to meaning,' Humberto tells her. It's exhausting, their need to resist a monotonous present rooted in an overly familiar past, and offering only the clichéd scripts of family, job, romance. 'Mass agreement = History,' Valeria's dying mother scrawls on a pad, unable to speak. 'It happens. Again and again. There's no resisting it, though it takes you by surprise every time. Now everyone is talking about marriage again....' Valeria's not having it either. The nice guy gets left behind without a trace of sentimentality for the contrived and narcissistic 'love' he offers as some emblem of what it is to be human. Human, as currently configured, is not OK. She journeys instead through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape. ....Ascher/Straus have chosen their own canon and manifested that subjective history as a unique constellation. Ascher/Straus are a crossroads where Doctor X, Shadow of a Doubt, The Damned Don't Cry, and Lola Montes come together with the sort of 'European' fiction that involves an intellectual engagement with the world. Despite all the thinking that goes on in these books, they are never pretentious, boring, or incomprehensible and are consistently funny.' -- --Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

'[A] study in disaffection, full of surreal dreams and brief, startlingly erotic episodes, all bathed in the light of the cathode-ray tube. Each person [Valeria] talks to seems to offer her a new reality or model of life. . . . Many are avid for the superreality of celebrity, the sense of living in the future that others have yet to reach. But the book is best at ordinary life, with a nod to William Carlos Williams in its surprising, saturated colors and sudden, sensuous cravings.' -- --Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0914232932
• ISBN 13: 9780914232933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224