Hopeful Monsters (Catastrophe Practice) - Hardcover

Mosley, Nicholas

4.12

547 ratings by Goodreads

9780916583859: Hopeful Monsters (Catastrophe Practice)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916583856 ISBN 13: 9780916583859

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991

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At the center of Hopeful Monsters, a pyrotechnically accomplished novel of ideas--winner of the Whitbread Award--are Max and Eleanor, who meet at an orgiastic clash of Nazi and communist youth in Weimar Germany. Their ensuing love affair takes them across landscapes that range from Stalin's Russia to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age and into the orbit of such extraordinary characters as Albert Einstein.

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Review:

Like Sartre, Camus, and Kundera before him, Nicholas Mosley has put forth a supremely challenging work that relies as much on philosophical and political themes as pure storytelling. Max Ackerman and Eleanor Anders are ambitious intellectuals--British and German, respectively--whose fascination with the scientific trends and political upheaval of the 20th century take them around the world and, eventually, into each other's arms. Intensifying, perhaps complicating the narrative of this 1990 Whitbread Prize winner is Mosley's use as a metaphor the Talmudic myth of the Lamed-Vov, a tale of 36 upstanding people for whom God sustains life on Earth. Left unanswered is whether Ackerman and Anders are among them.

From the Back Cover:

"A gigantic achievement that glows and grows long after it is put aside." - Independent on Sunday

"An expansive and liberating adventure of tests, quests, miracles and coincidences--It stands as a well-weathered, very benign, widespreading kind of tree, drawing sustenance from the dark earth of a 20th-century experience, and allowing all kinds of unexpected illuminations to shine through." - Observer

"A major novel--profound--frequently funny, sometimes painful, sometimes moving that asks fundamental questions about the nature of experience." - The Scotsman

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