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Six by
Jim Crace
Book #277 - Price US$ 6.99
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BOOK DESCRIPTION FROM BACK COVER:
The timid life of actor Felix Dern is uncorrupted by
Hollywood, where his success has not yet been shackled with any intrusive
fame. But in the theaters and the restaurants of his own city, "Lix" is
celebrated and admired for his looks, for his voice, and for his unblemished
private life. He has succeeded in courting popularity everywhere, this
handsome hero of the left, this charming darling of the right, this
ever-twisting weather vane.
A perfect life? No, he is blighted. He has been blighted since his teens,
for every woman he sleeps with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta's turn.
Their baby's due in May. Lix wants to say he feels besieged. Another child?
To be so fertile is a curse...
In Genesis, Jim Crace, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and
the Whitbread Novel of the Year, charts the sexual history of a loving,
baffled man, the sexual emancipation of a city, and the sexual ambiguities
of humankind.
Lix, an actor, is so virile that he impregnates every woman he beds;
unfortunately, the story he inhabits is a sterile exercise. Lix's
propagation problem in the book's opening chapter, his sixth child is
accidentally conceived on the front seat of a car is the kind of premise
that might have fuelled an amusing magic-realist novel. Crace's agenda,
however, is to deglamorize the act of procreation, and to tutor his readers
about the emotional dislocations that divide men and women even as their
bodies conjoin. Lix's erotic life is no fun: his partners criticize his
lovemaking skills and demand intimacy that he cannot provide. His sexual
history is recounted not as a comic picaresque but as a pompous lecture,
full of strained aphorisms (
The protean British writer, whose time and place settings have ranged from
the Stone Age (The Gift of Stones) and 40 days in the Judean desert
(Quarantine) to the past lives of two decomposing bodies in present-day
England (Being Dead), here creates a world very much like ours but different
in subtle ways calculated to unnerve the reader. The protagonist is an actor
named Felix Dern, aka Lix, and the unnamed country in which he lives is a
menacing place. The army and police have put down bank riots and quashed a
popular uprising; the ancient medieval city, once called the City of Kisses,
is zoned, with restrictions on travel. Yet Lix lives a charmed life. Despite
the innate caution-approaching timidity-of his personality, he's had a
brilliant career. Now middle-aged and embarked on his second marriage, he's
drawn into a dangerous revolutionary plot by a former lover, the mother of
one of his children. Lix's most vexing problem, revealed in the book's first
sentence, is fecundity: "Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his
child." The book's chapters are numbered from one to six to designate Lix's
children, some of whom are unknown to him. Sex pervades his thoughts and the
narrative, as Lix ruminates about sexual desire and infidelity. Mirroring
his protagonist's detached personality, Crace's tone throughout is cool and
nonjudgmental. His characters' foibles elicit witty aphorisms:
A photo gallery of pictures from this book is shown below
as well as a description of the pictures. Any questions please
email me
aldergrove@ppowner.com
   
This site was last updated
04/23/10
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