Requiem (American Literature) - Softcover

White, Curtis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564783081 ISBN 13: 9781564783080

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001

Synopsis

Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human). In an America where everyone keeps a secret website, and where a modern Prophet can only weep at the stories he hears, Requiem reveals our past, present and future with wit, sadness, and complete honesty.

About this title

About the Author:

Curtis White is the author of the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV and Requiem. A widely acclaimed essayist, his work appears regularly in Context and Harper's. He is an English professor at Illinois State University and the current president of the Center for Book Culture/Dalkey Archive Press

From Publishers Weekly:

Divided into six sections to imitate the six sections Mozart wrote for his unfinished Requiem, White's latest novel deals in pattern and frequency rather than character and plot. Each section is made up of brief pieces: seemingly random notes, interviews, stories and dramatic sketches. The notes range from thumbnail biographies of Mozart, Haydn, Saint-Saens and other musicians to pseudo-philosophical reflections; the interviews are usually between a character named the Modern Prophet, who, like White, is an unsung novelist (a point made in a fake Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross), and a murderer, a madman and some Beckett-like bit players. There is also a sequence of e-mails between Honeycomb at teenslut.com and an English professor named Tom. The theme of pornography is woven through the entire book, intensifying in a series of cameos of bestiality involving a Web site, a woman named Michelle, her dog Murphy and her boyfriend, Chad. White is deliberately trying to shock the reader with his misogyny, his hatred of children and his Manichean view of copulation. In this, he is following in the anti-heroic tradition initiated by Dostoyevski's Notes from the Underground, in which the reader is apparently invited to despise the hero, only to find that, gradually, the reader's own smugness is under attack. For Dostoyevski, the point was that there is no virtue without faith. In White's novel, however, the point seems more petulant: excoriation of these supposedly lowbrow times.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1564783081
• ISBN 13: 9781564783080
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332