Flanders
PATRICIA ANTHONY
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33 reviews (1998) (354p)Visit this book's Amazon.com page >>
| Book Description |
| Flanders is the breakout novel by Patricia Anthony, whose award-winning science fiction has transcended the genre through the sheer power of her storytelling. Flanders is Anthony's first true mainstream novel, a powerful evocation of the First World War--and the passage between life and death that reveals itself to one young soldier... The New York Times Notable Book that "ranks close to All Quiet on the Western Front in its impact." (San Francisco Chronicle) "A haunting, sometimes almost hallucinatory yet surprising war novel."-- Booklist (starred review) "One seriously fine talent...determined to break the bounds of speculative fiction."-- New York Daily News "A harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstrating--again--that Patricia Anthony is one of our great writers. Worthy of comparison to All Quiet on the Western Front."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Anthony's subtle and innovative storytelling reaches a new plane in her latest novel, a foray into magical realism that contrasts the waking hell of war with the fragile peace of eternity."-- Library Journal "Travis Lee...[is] an engaging character...and I would have read his story straight through, if my tears had let me."-- San Diego Union-Tribune "Profoundly spiritual....Nothing before has prepared readers for the visceral thrust of Flanders. A harrowing triumph."-- Kirkus Reviews |
| Amazon.com Review |
| Patricia Anthony's previous novels, from her 1993 debut, Cold Allies, until recently were all SF with a disturbing grasp of alienness and dislocation. Now Flanders brings us close to another kind of alien--Travis Lee Stanhope, farm boy, scholar, and a U.S. volunteer among the strangely accented British soldiers of the Great War. He tells his story in eloquent, pungent letters to a brother at home, moving from the beauty of spring in 1916 France to the dank hell of the trenches: mud, rats, lice, gas, foulness, death. Stanhope is highly rated as a sniper but for a while drinks excessively to blur the horror. His kindly captain is another poetry-quoting misfit, despised by other officers for his Jewishness. One fellow soldier fits in all too well, being so fond of killing that he doesn't stop at Germans; and his murders have terrible repercussions for both Stanhope and the captain. Touches of fantasy or magic realism are supplied by visions of a good and tranquil place, a graveyard where Death is a lovely girl in calico and where one after another of Stanhope's slaughtered comrades and enemies walk through his dreams, peaceful at last. An extraordinary war novel, hauntingly sad but with glints of hope and humor too. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk |
| Patricia Anthony Award Stats |
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| *Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award |
