Nothing Lasts Forever: Three Novellas - Hardcover

Steiner, Robert

2.62

8 ratings by Goodreads

9781619022317: Nothing Lasts Forever: Three Novellas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1619022311 ISBN 13: 9781619022317

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2014

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These three novellas each shimmer with exactitudes of falling out of love and falling into death, as existence at critical moments renounces normal life for moments of absolute desire. These are narratives of obsession and calamity. Lovers and wives are at the edge of themselves, saying the unsayable, doing the undoable, challenging us to keep our eyes open to the disintegration and pain. At the core of each tale is an erotic intensity. The prose is urgent. The stories are unforgettable.

Into the Green Ocean Deep sees a man’s last days with a dying lover as they engage in a final burst of transgressive eroticism. Negative Space recites the anguished thoughts of a man whose wife of twenty years has confessed her love for someone else as she packs to leave. In Inviolate, a wife suffers the imminent death of her husband from a fall that has left him comatose. Once coma defined the limit of her husband’s existence for the rest of it he was as well as he would ever be and so his wife at the foot of the bed observed that this was as good as he was going to look.”

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About the Author:

Robert Steiner is a master. His work ranks alongside J G Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Salter. One cannot overstate his importance as an American stylist in the 21st century. He is the author of several books including Matinee, Quill, The Catastrophe, and Bathers. He now lives in Florida.

From Booklist:

In an interview with January Magazine to promote a previous book, Dreamtime (2004), Steiner stated that one reason he writes is to stave off a mental death, to stay the inevitable decline of cognition. This may explain the dark elegance of his often-difficult prose stylings, and these three novellas, rooted in decay, infidelity, and death, address these themes explicitly. “Into the Green Ocean Deep” details a woman’s slow death and the indulgent depravity she and her lover enjoy in her last days and nights. Steiner’s nauseating obsession and incessant repetition stay painfully true to the events portrayed. “Inviolate” revolves around the ruminations of an adulteress as her husband lies comatose, and “Negative Space” tells the story of a decades-long affair in the voice of the cuckolded husband. While tobacco plumes, stiff whisky, and graphic ejaculation predominate, it is Steiner’s ability to illuminate life’s darkest edges that allows diligent readers to confront the bleak oblivion of trust betrayed. Readers of Paul Auster, John Hawkes, and Peter N�das will be up for the challenge. --Diego B�ez

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