The Long Corner

De: Alexander Maksik

Narrado por: James Patrick Cronin

A bold novel about ambition, grief, creativity, beauty, and existential emptiness that retraces the arc of American life and culture in the first decades of the 21st century.

It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.

A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.

“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

©2022 Europa Editions (P)2022 Europa Editions

Reseñas de la Crítica

“I really loved The Long Corner—it is funny, honest, and self-aware as it tries to figure out how to make and think about art.”—Lauren Elkin, writer and translator

“Maksik updates Fowles’ The Magus for the era of wellness, wealth and cultural impoverishment—a strange and haunting fable.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“The Long Corner is a sharp, witty and utterly engrossing novel about culture, kitsch, cynicism, and all the ways we corrupt what is most important to us. I laughed out loud, I couldn’t get enough of the characters, and I couldn’t put it down.”—Phil Klay, author of Missionaries and winner of the National Book Award

Cynical and Sad

Solomon Fields, the narrator of “The Long Corner,” is an unsympathetic, cynical fellow. He leaves a job in advertising, which he considers a sellout, to live in a cultlike artists colony on an island. He also leaves his materialistic live-in girlfriend, whom he doesn’t seem to care about. This may have been driven by memories of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who encouraged him to pursue art and to live with passion.

Most of the “artists” at the colony lack talent, in Fields’ view. They are drawn there by a harsh leader, Sebastian Light, who is supposed to be charismatic. Based on other reviews, Light is supposed to evoke Donald Trump, but I just found him pretentious and unbelievable. The novel becomes increasingly melodramatic, and some bad things happen.

The narration was good. James Patrick Cronin did a nice job with the different characters’ voices.