Touch by Alexi Zentner
Stephen has returned home to take up from his stepfather as pastor. He has also returned in time to sit at his dying mother’s bed side. He knows she is dying and is writing her eulogy, but at the same time remembering his past, as well as the stories and legends that grew up surrounding his grandfather Jeannot.
Zentner’s debut novel is a slow, atmospheric retelling of those childhood memories interspresed with Stephen’s musings on his current situation and relationships with his family members.
10 July 2011
Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr weren’t always the famous Professor X and Magento. This is their origin story, the origin story of the original X-Men. Set in the 1960s with the Cuban Missile crises at boiling point, the pot of tensions is being stirred further by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who has been doing the rounds since the 1940s. He believes that mutants are the superior race, and that they must destroy the inferior human race in order to take their rightful place as masters of the earth. Lebensraum and all that.
It is hard to blurb this book. On the one hand it is about Vesuvius and volcanic explosions and disasters both natural and man-made. But it is also a book about the origins of the earth, of the universe, and about how precarious our existence is. How so much of what we are today is dependent on natural events a thousand years ago, or a millennia ago, or so long ago that it is almost pointless to count the time because it is so difficult to grasp those sort of numbers.
Recent Comments