Locus Amoenus, by Victoria N. Alexander
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Locus Amoenus, by Victoria N. Alexander
Free PDF Ebook Locus Amoenus, by Victoria N. Alexander
In this beautifully nuanced dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, have retreated from Brooklyn to the idyllic rural countryside upstate, where for nearly eight years they have run a sustainable farm. Unfortunately, their outrageously obese neighbors, who prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture, reject their elitist ways (recycling, eating healthy, reading).Hamlet, who is now eighteen, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, where health, happiness, and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Paxil, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father's death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius.Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when he learns from Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, that Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, and corruption will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare's play, to tragedy.
Locus Amoenus, by Victoria N. Alexander- Amazon Sales Rank: #1787604 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.00" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 192 pages
Review Locus Amoenus uses hilarity and conspiracy theories to present the tragicomedy of a contemporary America that is beyond belief. An important contribution to contemporary American fiction. William Irwin Thompson, Wild River ReviewThis is Hamlet reimagined as a truther. The protagonist isn't just feigning madness--he's genuinely losing his mind. -KirkusImagine Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, written from the point of view of an American teen... Darkly humorous, harshly compelling, and cruelly relentless. Sheila's ReviewsA clever and engaging novel...Alexander has a free-spirited style that entertains on every page. Likely Stories Book Review, KWBU Heart of Texas Public RadioThe most stark divisions in America may spring not from political, ethnic or racial backgrounds but from informational sources...This is a theme explored in the darkly humorous novel, Locus Amoenus. Woodstock TimesLocus Amoenus tells of the country's reality of junk food, junk politics and ever-creeping power of the National Security Administration and Homeland Security. Middletown PressA scathing commentary on government-subsidized food programs in schools, low-level abuses of authority in local government and the destructive effects of war and pharmaceuticals. The Millbrook IndependentUntil now, the only 9/11-truth-themed novel of high literary quality was Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. Locus Amoenus is the best fictional treatment of 9/11 yet. It's hilarious, darkly ironic, playful, deeply moving. Kevin Barrett, Veterans Todaybrings Shakespeare into the post-9/11 world we currently experience and sows an emotionally powerful geopolitical drama. WBAI radio NYC
From the Back Cover A satirical examination of how we live in the 21st century, in the United Estates of America, with less civilization and more discontents than hitherto. Amidst nostalgic reflections on our past, Alexander notices current absurdities and contradictions in our appetites and critique of consumerism, and despite the tragedy, we have the consolation of her humor. I haven't laughed this well while reading in a long time. -Josip Novakovich, author of Shopping for a Better Country and Man Booker Prize finalist Brilliantly combining Shakespeare's knowing personal-political masterpiece, Hamlet, with post-911 ruminations of an edifying diversity of characters inhabiting Amenia in rural New York, novelist Victoria N. Alexander manages to do the three things that Nabokov says a good novelist must do: tell a story, inform, and enchant. Locus Amœnus, a short, sweet, sui generis blend of contemporary adult fiction and geopolitical drama, reminds us that something may be rotten in more than Denmark. -Dorion Sagan, author of The Cosmic Apprentice This brilliant, searing political novel deserves to be read by all of those interested in the current and future state of the United States of America. Darkly comic, wry and witty, Locus Amœnus is a genuine pastoral, a critique of the bloating and corruption of American life that draws on Hamlet for its dissection of politics, relationships, and love in post-9/11 America. From Swift to Shakespeare, the literary antecedents for Locus Amœnus are wide and varied, but the novel that emerges is wholly original and haunting in its graphic depiction of contemporary American mores and failures. I can't recommend Victoria N. Alexander's new novel enough. -Oona Frawley, author of Flight, Irish Book Award finalist A tale of dark political corruption, betrayal and a through the looking-glass world where you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, Locus Amœnus is also a fiercely funny romp by a talented writer. -Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor Alexander's Locus Amœnus is a biting, witty, and ultimately touching window on modern American life. She evokes the wit and depth of the best of Kingsolver and high satire and earnest social exploration of Pynchon or Delillo. Her experiences bridging the worlds of rural and urban northeastern America provide those of us with experience of both a welcomed bit of nostalgia, longing, familiarity, and a sense of loss. This story is to be savored, and hopefully re-read in certain existential moods. -David Koepsell, author of Reboot World
About the Author Victoria N. Alexander, PhD, is the author of three other novels, Smoking Hopes (Washington Prize for Fiction), Naked Singularity (Dallas Observer's "Best of 2003"), and Trixie, and a work of philosophy, The Biologist's Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature. She is currently finishing up an off-beat comedy screenplay about a dystopian gated community in Dallas, Texas, and her controversial theory of butterfly mimicry (based on Vladimir Nabokov's work) will soon be published by Yale University Press. She lives on a sheep farm with her husband and son.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Chasmic disbelief By petronmb As others have indicated here in these Amazon evaluations I have enjoyed this novel for many reasons, including its irony and playfulness in applying a parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a modern setting. I would like to concentrate on theme as I am sensing it and feeling it as an impact.One reader has said something about the “moral danger” of this story, as though it might engender some kind of moral problem in itself. Instead, I think, the story reveals moral problems deriving from manipulation and secrecy, as well as “complacency and conformity” (preface). I believe the same could be said of Shakespeare’s play—which led the way in being provocative on the nature of human weakness and moral decay.Victoria N. Alexander’s playful use of parody is significant in many ways, including in pointing back to Hamlet itself, and enhancing reader understanding for the bard’s masterpiece. But the resolution of this novel is difficult, taking us also to Lear with further parody in young Hamlet’s rejoinder to Horatio’s seeking reassurance that he will not give in to the sinister appeals of Dr. England: “I’m just going to ad lib from now on,” he says. “Let it come. Readiness is all.”That is, the question comes down to how to deal with confirmation of a Hamlet-like disillusion, or what I call “chasmic disbelief,” in the extent and the thickness of the denial conditioning all so willingly ascribed to, accepted, encloaked with, by that “piece of work” known generally as mankind, and in this novel’s setting, in particular the good folks of Amenia and America at large.Central and bold, Victoria has presented the continuing malaise of what really happened on 9/11 to the twin towers, with little doubt that the Hamlet and Horatio of this story know the story has been cooked. These two provide a number of indications within the narrative to support this conclusion, along with reviewing the odium that has accumulated in even daring to question the official story. This debate is of course still very much alive, with a Senator McCarthy-like tendency to dismiss criticism—or even very good questions on how the towers could ‘blow up”—as “treason” and “mental instability.”The novel's young Hamlet, an adolescent Hamlet perhaps, with his potentials for sharp and witty verbiage, is possibly at his peak moment of “chasmic disbelief” in the tree house with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in a chapter titled “Alas, Poor America,” with these two blockheads happily going off to the middle east to fight the wars, they of the “herd instinct,” and who (Hamlet thinks) “will win, I realize. These two, they will win.”The original Hamlet, with a rash moment of feeling when he states he will “sweep to my revenge,” has of course done nothing of the sort while staring into the abyss of “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” A moment later he ruminates on man as “noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable” etc.—that speech we are familiar with, not merely for its eloquence but as a standard the human might feel we have achieved and should live up to.The two works intertwine and mesh at this point in the tree house with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in that where Shakespeare’s Hamlet arrives to, along with the young Hamlet of Locus Amoenus, is the chasm of disbelief into which both topple.The bard’s Hamlet descent takes him to the realization that there is no overarching, omnipotent, objective “truth.” There is only what men, and it seems especially a male tendency, do make of “truth” in that “thinking makes it so.” For Dr. England this precept is basic to the safe, sane world the authorities would prefer to create for happy consumer land. Would Horatio and Hamlet in Locus Amoenus want something different, as in so upsetting the apple cart the society might turn to violence? Oh no no. Let the violence take place somewhere else.Locus Amoenus supplies contemporary context and learning for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in that the bard’s Hamlet is an odd sort of advanced modern, with the comfortable assumptions of a God-protected world suddenly shredding in the wind. So, from this Hamlet to the adolescent Hamlet in this novel, who comes to a similar realization—there is no protective agency to find the truth, there is not even much interest—and in turn to those of us feeling, as the prologue states, “Something is rotten in the United States of America,” we come to the novel’s invitation to apply a story to reality.The citizenry of Amenia, whether defending their obesity-producing school food programs or venting their ignorance and frustration over young Hamlet’s “terrorism” are possibly pathetic victims—good people unfortunately ignorant, or stupid. How their condition of refusal even to tolerate critical questioning applies to the macrocosmic level the novel is projecting takes us all toward the enormous difficulty and chasm of disbelief that authority and denial have induced in this society.In her Preface Victoria states this condition this way: “And now I know the corruption and conspiracy are not to blame so much as the meaner diseases of complacency and conformity.” When immediately following she says “I groan” in taking on this project I interpret this “groan” as sadness, as a forerunner of the distress her insights may stir, as well as the tragically sad nature of human ineptitude.Yet this ineptitude is the last thing our techie age wants to think about itself—or question. Could we be in some sort of descent, very similar to staring down into what I have called a “chasmic disbelief,” or on the brink of some sort of precipice, such as having to leap off a building more than 1300 feet high? Is it possible civilization is sliding backwards in this descent, reversing to pre-Shakespeare, back into the dark ages, into savagery?But this sort of question is a tricky one to pose, although it would seem Locus Amoenus poses it, without risk of being considered “crazy” or “dangerous” in some way, so steeped have we become in our chocolate, and our fat bodies and our way of life that we must protect at all costs, including by not thinking and indeed even by demonizing those who do think. That our way of life is not only grossly unfair but unsustainable we certainly would rather not take on, since we have anxieties enough as it is. Thinking so, we ameliorate the good or bad into the good—or at the least what we’d rather leave aside for now.I have lingered on what I see as the thematic impact of this novel, as I wrestle with the meaning of—and satisfaction thereby—its protagonist’s resolution to “ad lib” and to observe “readiness is all.” But, no. This is as it should be. Young Hamlet has left me with inspiration to do my own thinking instead of a slovenly expectation to have it done for me. I must continue to build my “readiness.”The connection between Hamlet’s dilemma, far more than being rattled by an illusion on the ramparts telling him about Claudius (but hey that makes for a good Shakespearean ghost story!), and young Hamlet’s confusion and disillusionment at the inadequacy of his world to cope with the death of his father, and our own moment, now, with the prolongation of the American indulgence in its plundering ways at large in the world—I do think this novel brings all these together very effectively.The novel is a pleasure in its playfulness and its alert and intelligent assessment of our own time.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Laughter & despair on the dark side of paradise By C. G. R. Davis A 9/11 widow and her son find sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, but something is rotten in the state of the States as our despairing narrator, the son, describes the incursion into their idyll of a second husband, whose arrival only serves to exacerbate the boy’s spiraling estrangement—from his childhood sweetheart, from the stories he has told himself about his father's death, and eventually from self, sense and sanity. The widow is Gertrude, the son Hamlet, the unwelcome stepfather Claudius, the childhood sweetheart Ophelia. Yes, Victoria Alexander aims high and, on the whole, hits her target. Oddly enough though, the preface to the novel actually put me in mind of another, no less illustrious model. Citing personal experience of local politics, Alexander says the state of the nation is such that "I groan at the prospect of taking on this subject, with which I would much rather have nothing to do," irresistibly bringing to mind Bartleby the Scrivener's mordant, "I'd prefer not to". Happily, Alexander succumbs and tackles not just one subject, the complacency and conformity that cripple American life, but many more, too, ranging from the meta-conspiracy that keeps its citizens mired in lard, consumerism, debt, populism, patriotism, and jealously guarded ignorance, to the more closely focused conspiracies of 9/11 'truthers'. The first part of the novel effectively sets the scene, evoking the aching void of grief felt by the bereaved as well as the pastoral paradise the refugees create in their flight from misery and modernity. It also establishes the theme of intrusion that runs throughout the book, because Gertrude and Hamlet, the one a liberal do-gooder, the other a wise-cracking wise young head, old beyond his years, are outsiders in rural America and the locals, narrow of mind and wide of girth, don't take kindly to Gertrude's well-meaning attempts to educate them in the ways of healthy eating, healthy living, and healthy thinking. This is the funniest section of the book as Alexander mercilessly pins down (no small task in the United Starch of America) the rednecks who refuse to be anything other than what they are and what their government wants them to be. She has some cracking one-liners, the narrator describing his obese neighbors as looking "like a bloated tick", "walking himself across the floor as if he were a refrigerator" and telling another character, "You’re obviously not from around here. Your arms hang at right angles to the floor.” However, the scorn never quite tips into total contempt, and Alexander is all too aware of the sad, limited lives imposed upon these sad, limited people: "The locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don’t need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these Neo Uncle Toms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content." Reading that, you'll probably understand why I found myself thinking that in some ways LOCUS AMOENUS is a book addressed to the rest of the world rather than America, saying things most Americans won't want to hear but which the rest of the world is all too happy to hear. Alexander's Hamlet is an interloper, a stranger in this strange land, dislocated in time and place, a boy brought up in books, for whom storytelling is more natural than human interaction (he was the one who told his Dad stories, not the other way round), despising both the specious diversions of modernity and the hicks that surround him. He describes himself as "an experiment. Some may claim 'gone awry' . . . I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year’s weather predictions." But Hamlet is not the only interloper because LOCUS AMOENUS is a book peopled by interlopers: urbanites interloping on the countryside, the new husband interloping on the pastoral idyll of mother and son, collective emotion masquerading as catharsis interloping on private grief, xenophobia interloping on a nation built by displaced underdogs, disillusionment and soma interloping on young love, a renegade teacher interloping on what the powers-that-be deem to be truth, the United States' army interloping on other people's countries, above all vested interests and a covert tendency toward fascism interloping on everything that American democracy promised and failed to be. Initially, the archaic names can seem intrusive and distracting (Gertrude, OK, but Polonius? Hamlet? Laertes?), leaving one with a sense that the Shakespearian model would have worked better as a hidden structuring device rather than an overt template. However, the parallels are handled deftly and it does lend a sense of foreboding, since we know all too well what's going to happen to these people. Moreover, as the dark comedy shades into something darker still, there's a dreadful fascination as we wonder, "How's she going to pull off that particular scene then?" It should be emphasized, it's not all darkness. The humor, which is premised more on language than character or situation, coats many a bitter pill: "it was pointless, we realized, for me to go to school, if the objective was to receive an education"; Gertrude and Hamlet were "so condescending our backs hurt"; the chief villain of the piece has a "smile (that) is the expression of someone carrying heavy furniture" (she’s particularly good on this sort of imagery: visual, evocative, concise, and very funny). There is also a touching account of childhood romance, while the wit and insights (no matter how excoriating) suggest dumbing down has not totally homogenized the nation, and there is a nice paean to an alternative rural America, saner and more functional, pieced together by the marginals, hippies, dropouts and alternative lifestylers, people for whom Emerson is not the first name in a dimly remembered prog-rock band and who don't mistake Thoreau for some dodgy sounding foreigner. By the same token, although the book has a distinct political agenda and a clear sense of who is right and who is wrong in America, the satire is even handed. Despite or perhaps because she is probably a part of it, Alexander neatly skewers the processes of gentrification brought about by liberal, educated outsiders settling in the countryside, and she is painfully funny on Gertrude's painfully labored attempts to improve her new neighbors, blissfully unaware that nobody takes kindly to being improved. The author is also careful to present alternative arguments to her central theses, both on the micro level and the macro. The Claudius figure, who has "a PhD in engineering, (but) . . . a negative degree of knowledge about humanity", is a bureaucratic 9/11 investigator with a talent for stating the totally obvious at great length, a talent that served him well in his job, but he is also a boring unimaginative man crushed by boring unimaginative and above all meaningless work. Likewise, the townspeople are not just dimwitted oafs, they are also real people with real problems, muddling through as best they can in a world beyond reckoning. And when the 9/11 conspiracy comes to the fore, a conspiracy the denouement implies is real, the alternative arguments for the official story are clearly and convincingly rehearsed. Hamlet's long dark night of the soul, when he is apparently in possession of evidence to support the conspiracy theory and is going off his head, is well done and rendered entirely plausible. In a topsy-turvy world where even Catch-22 has been inverted and the irrational reigns supreme, a world where anyone who thinks or (worse) asks questions is put on medication, it seems eminently reasonable that he should elect to 'go' mad. Needless to say, it all ends badly, and the deus ex machina is no generous Fortinbras but a homicidal moron. The implications are bleak, but along the way there is much to entertain and enlighten. Indeed, for me the real pleasure in this book, what lingers, is not so much the plot, still less the conspiracy, but the portraits of people, places, communities, and relationships. For a novel based on Shakespeare, that's about right: big ideas anchored in human lives.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Hamlet Redux By Clay Reynolds This witty and darkly shaded re-imagining of Shakespeare's masterpiece in a contemporary setting manipulates the reader into a position of discomforting engagement with both the brilliance of the character and the charm of Alexander's skillful meshing of script to story. Readers familiar with Hamlet will find themselves wondering on every page how she will manage this or that development, scene or event, and then being delighted that she has left no twist unturned. The less-well-initiated will revel in the insightful depiction of the modern and highly precocious teenaged hero, struggling as he does with the desire for revenge balanced against his own passionate and unselfconsciously illicit commitments. Alexander skewers small-town America and along the way leaves in shambles those who accept without question the authority of the status quo, preferring to believe that which is certified over that which is verifiable. This is a delight to read and provides a chuckle on almost every page, as her hero candidly reveals his own tragic flaws as he moves toward an increasingly dark climax.
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