Nick Arvin
Autor/a de Articles of War
Obres de Nick Arvin
Obres associades
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom normalitzat
- Arvin, Nick
- Nom oficial
- Arvin, Nicholas
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- North Carolina, USA
- Llocs de residència
- Denver, Colorado, USA
Clio, Michigan, USA - Educació
- University of Michigan
Stanford University
Iowa Writers' Workshop - Professions
- automotive engineer
forensic engineer
power plant engineer
writer - Premis i honors
- Rosenthal Foundation Award
- Biografia breu
- Nick Arvin grew up in Clio, Michigan. He earned degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan and Stanford, and he has worked in automotive engineering, forensic engineering, and the design of power plants and oil and gas facilities. Arvin is also the author of three books: In the Electric Eden, Articles of War, and The Reconstructionist. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, and Rocky Mountain News and has been honored with numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boyd Award from the American Library Association, the Colorado Book Award, and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society, the Isherwood Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is on the faculty of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
Membres
Ressenyes
The Reconstructionist: A Novel de Nick Arvin
The Reconstructionist started out well. Then the plot begins to slowly crumble apart as the lead character travels from site to site, hits a person, discovers a dead body, gets robbed, and more in an effort to reconstruct a faulty childhood memory in a hugely round-about, unbelievable way. The book is strongest when it keeps to the physics of a crash.
I pictured this book as a kind of mash-up of Tom Jones and Huck Finn – a picaresque adventure set during the War of 1812. I thought the war would be more in the background than it was, but even though war novels are my least favorite genre, I really liked this book. Turns out I don’t mind a war story if the writing is quick and clever, the characters are uniquely entertaining (especially Henry, a child to rival Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), and there's no bloat or baggy-ness to cut out.
George Tilson leaves his Iowa home for Normandy as an eighteen-year-old recruit in World War II. Shy and unassuming, he keeps to himself and earns the nickname “Heck” because he doesn’t swear. He is muscled from summers of farm labor, and knows how to work long and hard without complaint. But combat is far more brutal than he imagined and fear consumes him.
This novella packs a big punch. The writing is at once reserved and intimately emotional. The reader witnesses the horrors of war along with Heck, who frequently seems removed from the battles due to his cautious nature. But his fear, terror, and horror are intensely felt, as is his shame at his perceived cowardice. The combat scenes capture perfectly the chaos and confusion of a major battle. The scenes at base camp capture the boredom and uncertainty of “waiting to be called,” and give the reader (and the combatants) a much-needed respite.
When I finished I was not sure I agreed with Heck’s self-assessment that he is a coward. I recognize that he is frightened to inaction at times, but that seems reasonable to me given the circumstances he finds himself in. I asked my husband (a combat infantry platoon leader in Vietnam) about this. His response is that it’s normal to be scared, but you have to face it. I think there are times when Heck definitely faces his fears and conducts himself well. But there are other incidents when he takes “the coward’s way out,” and those tend to be when he is alone and without someone to witness his cowardice. Internally, however, he is always looking to escape.
And that is what gives the ending such impact. Without giving anything away, I don’t see how he can escape that final scenario … and I’m not so sure he even wants to.
… (més)
This novella packs a big punch. The writing is at once reserved and intimately emotional. The reader witnesses the horrors of war along with Heck, who frequently seems removed from the battles due to his cautious nature. But his fear, terror, and horror are intensely felt, as is his shame at his perceived cowardice. The combat scenes capture perfectly the chaos and confusion of a major battle. The scenes at base camp capture the boredom and uncertainty of “waiting to be called,” and give the reader (and the combatants) a much-needed respite.
When I finished I was not sure I agreed with Heck’s self-assessment that he is a coward. I recognize that he is frightened to inaction at times, but that seems reasonable to me given the circumstances he finds himself in. I asked my husband (a combat infantry platoon leader in Vietnam) about this. His response is that it’s normal to be scared, but you have to face it. I think there are times when Heck definitely faces his fears and conducts himself well. But there are other incidents when he takes “the coward’s way out,” and those tend to be when he is alone and without someone to witness his cowardice. Internally, however, he is always looking to escape.
And that is what gives the ending such impact. Without giving anything away, I don’t see how he can escape that final scenario … and I’m not so sure he even wants to.
… (més)
I enjoyed the start of this book. The initial entry to the characters and the work of forensically examining car accidents was well written, interesting and intriguing as well as absurd. The writing is poetic and the use of car accidents as a existential device was clever, but the effect this had on me was to hold me at arms length from the characters, and as there are only really three this narrowed the book considerably as it went on. Even before the crisis that is engineered by one of the characters, albeit with some unintended results, you felt these people were unbelievably fractured and despite the events that unfold, untethered from consequence. At least the male characters had their forensic engineering to captivate and ground them; Heather was almost entirely written as someone drowning in her own ennui and was more projected onto by the men rather than existing in her own right. Indeed as the crisis escalates she is left wrapped in her own emotions whilst they pursue their own quest through the madness of their breakdown, until she, one again, becomes part of that quest. The richness of this book comes in the gaps, in figuring out the emotional physics that results in the accident of these three people coming together and analysing the damage inflicted on them. My interest in doing this ran out of road before the ending of the book, but it was a dreamy ride to nowhere whilst it lasted.… (més)
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Estadístiques
- Obres
- 4
- També de
- 2
- Membres
- 279
- Popularitat
- #83,281
- Valoració
- 3.7
- Ressenyes
- 25
- ISBN
- 21