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Title details for I Am Radar by Reif Larsen - Available

I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen
Adam Grupper
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
In this kaleidoscopic novel, a love-struck radio operator discovers a secret society offering mind-bending performance art in war zones around the world. In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists-who stage experimental art for people suffering under war-time sieges- Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. In I Am Radar, acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen-the author of The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet-delivers a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic. In the wreckage of the twentieth century, the characters of I Am Radar hunt for what life and art can still be salvaged. During the civil wars of Yugoslavia, two brothers walk shockingly different paths: one into the rapacious paramilitary forces terrorizing the countryside, the other into the surreal world of besieged Belgrade. In arctic Norway, resistance schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a secret Nazi nuclear reactor to stage a dramatic art performance, with no witnesses. In the years before Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, an expatriate French landowner adopts an abandoned native child and creates a lifelong scientific experiment of his new son's education. In the modern-day Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the world's largest library in the futile hope that the books will cement a peace in the war-torn country. All of these stories are united in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where a radio operator named Radar struggles with a horrible medical affliction, a set of hapless parents, and-only now, as an adult-all too ordinary white skin. A sophisticated, highly addictive reading experience that draws on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and performance art, Larsen's I Am Radar is a novel somehow greater than all of its remarkable parts, a breathtaking and unparalleled joyride through the worst that humanity has to offer only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 10, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781490649153
      • File size: 727242 KB
      • Duration: 25:15:05

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      A baby named Radar is at the center of this sprawling story of history, parenthood, and fate. Born black to white parents, Radar has a life full of mystery from the minute he enters the world. He grows up to become a radio transmitter, and Adam Grupper infuses the unfolding connections with mysterious undertones. His narration moves swiftly through the story's many shifting time periods and countries. In the transitions from Eastern Europe to modern America, he maintains a steady tempo. Grupper's flexibility is evident in the characters' emotions, as revealed in dialogue. He excels with a range of male and female voices of a variety of nationalities. This is a complex, lengthy work, well told for the patient listener. M.R. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 15, 2014
      The gripping story of Radar Radmanovic, born in Elizabeth, N.J., in 1975, begins with his coal-black skin—which came as a total surprise to his white
      parents. The troubled couple take young Radar to northern Norway for an experimental electric-shock procedure that will alter his skin color. There, they meet a tight-knit group of secretive physicists/puppeteers who call themselves Kirkenesferda. They stage elaborate avant-garde puppet performances in the middle of war zones and recruit Radar’s father—an expert radio and TV engineer. With masterly prose, Larsen (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet) tells the tragic history of how the puppeteers managed to create art while others around them suffered and died, everywhere from New Jersey to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The novel takes a Borgesian turn near the end, when Radar finds himself in Africa, helping Kirkenesferda produce its most ambitious performance yet. Larsen’s many vivid imaginings include a spellbinding narrative of a family torn apart by the Bosnian war (complete with photos and drawings), the history of a Cambodian rubber plantation, and a treacherous journey across the Atlantic in a container ship. This is a sprawling, engrossing novel about the ravages of war and the triumph of art. Larsen is an effortless magician, and his performance here is a pure delight. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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