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- Hardcover: 212 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday; 1st ed edition (September 1, 1990)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385247060
- ISBN-13: 978-0385247061
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
- Category: Fiction - Historical, Popular American Fiction, War stories, World War II, 1939-1945
- Condition: Former library book. Dustjacket completely protected by clear mylar cover which keeps the original dustjacket clean & free of tears. However, it shows slight rubbing due to circulation and can be removed. NO sticker on spine or cover. Card holder, withdrawn stamp & one library sticker on very first page which is otherwise solid brown. One small library sticker on title page. One sticker on dedication page. Corners are not bumped. Pages are otherwise clean, tight & square. Please see digital scans above for visual confirmation.
- Original Retail: $18.95
From Publishers Weekly
Thornton's ( Imagining Argentina ) distinctive gift as a novelist--his ability to compellingly evoke the era of which he writes and to create characters whose lives epitomize a critical period of history--is again manifestly evident in this work, set in the decade encompassing the Spanish Civil War and WW II. Here he tells the story of two writers--one real, one fictitious--who succumb to the forces of fascism but whose works transcend their time and place to speak eternal truths. A chance meeting with the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca transforms the destiny of Joaquin Wolf, a half-Spanish, half-German novelist. Lorca's murder by the Guardia Civil and Joaquin's own experiences in the bombing of Guernica are the first in a chain of events in which both writers' livesstet lives per sss take on a mesmerizing similarity. The narrator, Joaquin's lover, Ursula Krieger, recognizes that Lorca's poem Romance Son ambulo has an uncanny relevance to the tragic experiences she recounts. In the novel's denouement, the poem also supplies a union of insight and faith. Thornton's prose is illuminated by sharply visual, surrealistic metaphors. His interwoven plot lines are ingeniously conceived and developed, but the portentously monotonous voice of the narrator, while appropriate to her haunted personality, in some respects distances the reader from the characters' emotions. Still, this book should be read for the searing intensity of Thornton's imagination.
From the inside flap:
Published in 1987, Lawrence Thornton's first novel, Imagining Argentina, was greeted with extraordinary acclaim and the New York Times noted that he had "created his own brand of magical realism." Now, in Under the Gypsy Moon, Thornton has taken magic and realism one step further to create a vivid, deeply affecting novel of a man and a woman who borrow the spirit of the poet Garcia Lorca to take a stand against the evil of fascism.
"Who knows where memory begins?"
So begins Under the Gypsy Moon, a novel spun out of the lives of three unforgettable characters: Joaquin Wolf, an avant-garde novelist whose awakening to political realty during the Spanish Civil War leads him to Paris, where he writes for a French Undergroudn newspaper: Ursula Krieger, the narrator, whose inner strength and intellectual courage allow her to overcome her secret, anguished past and rise above the dehumanizing presence of the Nazis: and Federico Garcia Lorca (whose poem "Romance Sonambulo" gives the book its title), the great symbolist poet of Spain, a casualty of war whose spirit lives on in Ursula and Joaquin.
Life in Paris during the Occupation is renderd with precise detail, but Under the Gypsy Moon is far more than a chronicle of war. Its central theme is nothing less grand than the nature of courage. Lorca's struggles against fascism provide Joaquin and Ursula an example that allows them to transcend the conditions of the times, and the novel ultimately becomes an impassioned testimony to the power of people who refuse to succumb to silence. And it is a love story as well, an extremely suspenseful love story informed by turbulence and the commitment to a cause beyond the self. It is Thornton's ability to summon forth this transcendent element, while at the same time remaining true to historical accuracy, that gives the novel its unique signature.
Gorgeously written, gripping, and deeply moving, Under the Gypsy Moon is an enduring contribution to our modern literature.
About the author:
Lawrence Thornton is the Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine. He has finished his third novel and is now at work on a fourth.
From the back cover:
Praise for Lawrence Thornton's Imagining Argentina
"A harrowing, briliant novel." -- The New Yorker
"A powerful new novel...Thornton seems to have wedded his study of such writers as Borges and Marques with his own instinctive gift for metaphor, and in doing so, created his own brand of magical realism." -- New York Times
"In a time when much North American fiction is contained by crabbed realism, Thornton takes for his material one of the bleaker recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human spirit and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit." -- Washington Post Book World
"Imagining Argentina is a slim volume filled wiht beautiful writing. It is an exciting adventure story. It is a haunting love story. And it is a story for all time." -- Detroit Free Press
"A powerful first novel and a manifesto for the memorializing power of literature." -- New York Times Book Review
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