Sea of Hooks (PEN Center USA Fiction Award) - Hardcover

Lindsay Hill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1620540061 ISBN 13: 9781620540060

Publisher: McPherson & Company, 2013

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2016 DACTYL LITERARY FICTION AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2015 IPPY FOR LITERARY FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2014 PEN CENTER USA FICTION AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE 2014 OREGON BOOK AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE 2014 CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2014 FOREWORD BOOK-OF-THE-YEAR AWARD, LITERARY FICTION
LONG-LISTED FOR THE 2014 KIRKUS FICTION PRIZE
Top 5 Fiction title of 2013 by Publishers Weekly and also their "Most Underrated Book of the Year"
Selected by New York magazine as a top 10 book of 2013
The Oregonian's #1 Northwest Book of 2013
A Counterpunch 2013 top fiction pick

A boy grew up beside a sea of hooks and he learned to swim in that sea and to notice the hooks as they rose and fell and twisted in the tides...
What if you saw the world with all its signs and signals, its schedules, habits and goals, the matrix of friends, the unspoken codes of conduct emptied of everyday meaning.
Imagine that the debris collected from the streets of your childhood spoke more urgently to you, with messages and wonders that compelled you to enter another world, a world whose broken pieces converged at the junctures of vision and illusion, of life and death.
 In this riveting, darkly humorous and sometimes harrowing novel, Christopher Westall, an alarmingly imaginative young man, experiences repeated trauma and transformation.
His childhood has shattered into a thousand glints, shards, and tangled threads that are gathered and rewoven by the reader while following Christopher's pivotal journey from San Francisco to the mountains of Bhutan.
As memory, dream, fear and resilience exert their tidal pulls, Christopher's life tilts, collides, reverses, dissolves and re-emerges, while risks and revelations glisten side-by-side in the depths of the Sea of Hooks.

About this title

About the Author:

Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College.  Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry and his work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. Sea of Hooks, his first novel, is the product of nearly twenty years of work and was composed concurrently with his other writing and editorial projects.  These included the production of a series of recordings of innovative writing under the Spoken Engine label, and the co-editing, with Paul Naylor, of the literary journal Facture. Since leaving a career in banking, he has worked in the nonprofit sector.  He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, the painter Nita Hill.

Review:

Poets see the world in a different way from the rest of us, and Sea of Hooks shows that, at least in the case of poet Lindsay Hill, they see novels differently, too. The first work of fiction from Hill (who lives in Portland and has published six volumes of poetry), Sea of Hooks could be described as a coming-of-age novel but that would do an injustice to its unique form, and to the challenging yet invigorating experience of reading it.
Sea of Hooks begins with a poem (one that plays with the image of the title phrase), then launches into its story with a structure that never varies: a series of single paragraphs (some just one sentence, others a page long or more), each with a title, that may or may not be chronologically connected to the paragraph that came before. It s almost a pointillist approach to literature: a series of not-quite-random dots, vivid and bright, that gradually form a darkly shimmering picture.
[. . .] The book jacket tells us that Hill spent nearly 20 years writing Sea of Hooks, and it shows; every paragraph seems to glimmer with a phrase that reminds us why we read literature. Christopher, pressing his tongue to a hailstone, finds that it tastes like icy smoke ; as a small child, he collected forgotten bits of paper and debris, calling them messengers and keeping them in his pockets until he understood what they were saying. And then, one day, he didn t pick the messengers up anymore.
It wasn t that he d come to see there was no city, or that everything didn t belong to everything else or that the messengers were not parts of people s lives that they d thrown away ... It was very matter-of-fact, like clothes that don t fit anymore or walking home a different way from school. Dipping in and out of poetry like toes flirting with a blue lake s water, Sea of Hooks isn t an easy read, but it s often mesmerizing. --Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

Sea of Hooks is a terrifyingly beautiful novel by Portland writer Lindsay Hill. I can't think of the last time a book wrapped itself around me with such instant intensity, pulling me into another space, another life, one so steeped in pain from the first paragraph yet I couldn't put it down.
Christopher, the protagonist, is as unique in his way and as endearing as the autistic protagonist of the same name in Christopher Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Hill's Christopher starts as a small boy living in a kind of patrician-manqué milieu in San Francisco in the 1950s and '60s, in a household of secrets and silences. His fearful, brittle, and controlling mother communicates with her son by spot-grilling him on contract bridge strategy. His father is hard-drinking, there but not-there. Christopher lives on tiptoe, afraid any aberration will set off his mother, whom he must at all cost protect. [. . .]
Hill excels at creating characters wounded, evil, and sympathetic alike, in all their weird specificity, and there are mysteries in Sea of Hooks, spinning lines of tension that pull you through. Yet this is also a deeply metaphysical book. Hill's meditations on memory and the relation of past to present are as deep as (and a lot more concise than) Proust's. But it is the ancient and mysterious world of Buddhism that saturates the narrative. The Buddhist view of the world as a realm of suffering perfectly mirrors Christopher's experience. The novel's central parable is told by the Buddhist teacher, Patrul Rinpoche, as an image of compassion (which, curiously, first appears in a dream of Christopher's): a mother runs along the bank of a rapid river, keeping up with her drowning child, running along the bank because she has no arms. This enigmatic koan threads through the novel, surfacing at intervals, gathering meaning with each appearance. [. . .] --Maya Muir --Maya Muir, The Oregonian

Sea of Hooks is a terrifyingly beautiful novel by Portland writer Lindsay Hill. I can't think of the last time a book wrapped itself around me with such instant intensity, pulling me into another space, another life, one so steeped in pain from the first paragraph yet I couldn't put it down.
Christopher, the protagonist, is as unique in his way and as endearing as the autistic protagonist of the same name in Christopher Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Hill's Christopher starts as a small boy living in a kind of patrician-manqué milieu in San Francisco in the 1950s and '60s, in a household of secrets and silences. His fearful, brittle, and controlling mother communicates with her son by spot-grilling him on contract bridge strategy. His father is hard-drinking, there but not-there. Christopher lives on tiptoe, afraid any aberration will set off his mother, whom he must at all cost protect. [. . .]
Hill excels at creating characters wounded, evil, and sympathetic alike, in all their weird specificity, and there are mysteries in Sea of Hooks, spinning lines of tension that pull you through. Yet this is also a deeply metaphysical book. Hill's meditations on memory and the relation of past to present are as deep as (and a lot more concise than) Proust's. But it is the ancient and mysterious world of Buddhism that saturates the narrative. The Buddhist view of the world as a realm of suffering perfectly mirrors Christopher's experience. The novel's central parable is told by the Buddhist teacher, Patrul Rinpoche, as an image of compassion (which, curiously, first appears in a dream of Christopher's): a mother runs along the bank of a rapid river, keeping up with her drowning child, running along the bank because she has no arms. This enigmatic koan threads through the novel, surfacing at intervals, gathering meaning with each appearance. [. . .] --Maya Muir, The Oregonian

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1620540061
• ISBN 13: 9781620540060
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 349