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This tragicomic epic brings to life in America the enduring masterpiece of Homer's "Odyssey" and the Irish saga of Joyce's "Ulysses" in a Father's Day in Boston after the Vietnam War in 1974. This new "Bostoniad" portrays the American immigrant descendants of Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus of Dublin. After Tim Finnegan's Irish wake Rudy and Penelope Bloom of Beacon Hill meet Harvard Professor, Dr. Thomas Dedalus. "Bloomsday" narrates in a pixilistic style a chorus of New England voices blending to render new verses of the greatest epic of antiquity and the 20th century's most celebrated literary novel on the legendary wandering home of Odysseus after the fall of Troy.
"A highly entertaining book that can be enjoyed simply on the merits of Lentz’s remarkable command of the language and his ability to turn a phrase." -- Gary Anderson, Author of "Animal Magnet"
"An excellent book... This is just such a striking read." --Goodreads
"Curious, appealing... picaresque and picturesque, 'Bloomsday' succeeds... The dialogue is masterful. It will have you smiling." --Times Chronicle
"Challenges readers seeking a richer literary experience outside the mainstream." --Greenwich Post
"His writing is... on a higher plane for a higher purpose." --Wilton Bulletin
"Lentz especially like to explore how creative people survive in a large and often impersonal environment. What is the role of a talented individual, an artist for example, in a complex, vast society?" --New Canaan Advertiser
"The retention of dignity is a recurring theme." --Lewisboro Ledger
"His pixilism is a sort of 21st century, digital metaphor that has similarities to French Impressionist paintings. Each sentence represents an idea, image or treatment of the big picture." --Redding Pilot
"Lentz's approach to writing is soul driven -- searching for the meaning of life." --Weston Forum
"I'm recommending it to everyone in my 'Ulysses' class." -- Nancy Bischoff, bn.com
"I'm sitting in my kitchen transfixed! It is hilarious... It's so good, I hate to have it end...Totally delicious." --Agnes Potter, bn.com
About the Author
Lentz has published six literary novels, which strive to inform the genre with the proposition of innovative, literary styles: "For the Beauty of the Earth", "AmericA, Inc.","Bloomsday", "Bourbon Street", "The Day Trader" and "The Silver King." In addition, he has published two stage plays, "AmericA, Inc." and "Bloomsday: A Tragicomedy" as well as a volume of poetry, "Old Greenwich Odes." He is a member of the Academy of American Poets. Published selections of his collected works from novels, stage plays and prose are available in "Essential Lentz." In "Novel Criticism" Lentz offers a new literary theory for the critique of novels. He has lived in Boston's Back Bay, the Garden District of New Orleans, Houston and Philadelphia's Main Line. Currently, he resides with his family in Greenwich, CT. Lentz has served as Bates College Alumnus-in-Admissions, Board of Directors of Healing the Children (Northeast), Literacy Volunteers of America of Stamford/Greenwich, Volunteer in St. Paul's Chapel at Ground Zero, Midnight Run for New York City Homeless, JazzAid: New Orleans, St. Baldrick's Foundation for Children's Cancer Research, Hope + Heroes Foundation, Wave of Hope for Hurricane Katrina Relief, the Connecticut Association of Publishers and Authors, and the New York Center for Fiction.
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Subjects
literary fictionPeople
Thomas Dedalus, Rudy BloomPlaces
BostonTimes
Friday, June 14 - Father's Day, June 16, 1974Showing 1 featured edition. View all 1 editions?
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This is an astonishing book. In Bloomsday the magic of David Lentz’s imagination has produced a fictional transmigration of souls, a rebirth of James Joyce’s characters in a modern time and place. Dedalus, Bloom, Haines, Buck Mulligan and others of the original Dublin cast have been reborn in contemporary Boston. Mr. Lentz has accomplished this feat not only with prodigious erudition, but also with a delicate whimsy and an exquisitely chiseled poetic language. For this is a poetic prose of the first order -- lyrical and learned, but brought down to earth by the real particulars of modern life and enlivened by punning, rapid-fire repartee.
The reader recurrently experiences a pleasure like déjà vu, because his footing is in two places at the same time -- both in the present narrative and in Joyce’s prototype. Here again are the carnal appetites and pathos of an apparently soon-to-be-cuckolded Bloom. But now it is Leopold Bloom’s dead son Rudy who is reborn and relives his father’s drama. Dedalus is now Stephen’s son Thom who, after he has been fired from Harvard for drunkenness, first meets Bloom at Tim Finnegan’s wake.
Not only Joyce’s characters but also each episode of his drama has been reimagined and reclothed in modern dress. In the Proteus episode a drunken, despairing Dedalus delivers a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy stumbling through Harvard Yard. In Lentz’s recasting of the Nausicca episode, the language of Rudy Bloom’s passionate, melancholy meditations is worthy of Joyce himself. In the Oxen of the Sun chapter, Mr. Lentz’s acrobatic literary clowning is more reminiscent of the Marx Brothers. After Dedalus gives Bloom LSD, the Circe episode becomes a boisterous, hallucinogenic rhapsody. And what of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? It has been reforged as a splendid, down-to-earth, exquisitely moving prose poem delivered by Rudy Bloom’s ravishingly beautiful and deeply loyal wife Penelope.
A very brief review can’t do justice to Mr. Lentz’s touching, funny, intricate, seemingly infinite variations on a theme by Joyce.
But here’s the crux of the matter: this is a major work by a major writer -- and sophisticated readers will relish it.
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November 20, 2011 | Edited by David B. Lentz | Edited without comment. |
November 20, 2011 | Edited by David B. Lentz | Edited without comment. |
November 20, 2011 | Edited by David B. Lentz | Edited without comment. |
November 20, 2011 | Edited by David B. Lentz | Edited without comment. |
March 22, 2011 | Created by 167.206.79.227 | Added new book. |