Smith’s narration has a reflexivity to it that radically alters the reader’s sense of time. With this volume of historical fiction, Minkoff truly does seem to inhabit the language of those times. Presented as a memoir of Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1607, The Weight of Smoke (McPherson & Co, 389 pages) is the work of a self-described antiquarian, rare books dealer whose imagination is stacked to the ceiling with historic archives and Elizabethan letters. Posted in just literary fiction, science fiction | Tagged disturbing literary fiction, gritty literary fiction, lyrical writing style | Leave a comment The Weight of Smoke by George Robert Minkoff Lyric mastery and a tone of brooding psychic disturbance are the bedrock of the novel, a startling penetration of beauty couched within doom. None of the characters has a name or is “likable” or “relatable,” as the current jargon has it but do not read Kavan for those ends. The plot is episodic, evading conventional patterns. Ice shifts between bleak realism and a haunted panorama of psychological terrors. Kavan’s prose swerves breathtakingly from the delicate and the brutal. The anti-hero narrator, a man obsessed with a frail, stunning young woman, chronicles the doom he foresees for his world and the girl who is the object of his fascination. Kavan creates a world overrun by vast ice sheets caused by nuclear winter. Published in 1967, Ice (Peter Owen, 158 pages) is a harrowing, oblique, beautiful novel increasingly viewed as a modern classic on par with 1984 and Brave New World.
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