Requiem, Mass.: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: John Dufresne
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $9.10
You Save: $15.85 (64%)
New (37) Used (12) from $8.94
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 173078
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0393057909
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780393057904
ASIN: 0393057909
Publication Date: July 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW HARDBACK BOOK AND DUST COVER IN EXCELLENT CONDITION, PROMPT NEXT DAY SHIPPING IN PADDED ENVELOPES
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In the tragicomic mode of his best-selling Louisiana Power & Light, a hilarious and tenderhearted novel about a son's attempts to save his family.
John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny's mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she's sure of it, and she's pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn't need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Nate Apres Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she's not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself.
In his "truly original voice" (Miami Herald) and with the "miraculous beauty of his tale-telling" (New York Times Book Review), Dufresne brings his unparalleled eye for the tragic and the absurd to the dysfunctions and joys of family in this powerful new novel.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Wonderful creative writing - colorful, developed characters - fast moving... September 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
... all of this makes for a great book - one that the author's thoughts and characters will pop up many times in my thoughts in the future.
After reading this book I went of a John Dufresne quest and located
"Love Warps the Mind a Little"
I liked it even better, and once again - was sad to see the end - and will miss all of the characters.
Dufresne has a great imagination - and if he isn't making up most of the descriptions of the characters - I just may have to stay in my room and do all of my "daily activities" thru the Internet and never leave home again!
Very Unique! August 8, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book grabbed me by the heart strings and didn't let go. The story is hilarious and bittersweet. The main characters come to life and become a part of you while you are reading this. It took me three nights to read and I had that anticipation building to get back to it to find out what's next for Johnny Boy, Audrey, Frances and Rainy et al. There are a gazillion characters in this book. That is not a detriment, they all have their place and are also vividly fleshed out. The only reason this was not a five star review for me was because I started getting a little weary of the extremely goofy names everyone possessed. I know it's meant to be humorous but I think the tactic went a little too far. That is just a personal opinion. Read this book - you'll be glad you did!
P.S. I found myself wondering if John Dufresne had ever lived in Western MA, which is where I live. Some of the people and places described were eerily familiar to me.
 Brilliant, and unsettling. July 12, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Absolutely brilliant, as we can expect from John Dufresne, and to the other two positive reviews, I might add "Me, too! Me, too!"
A previous novel of Dufresne's, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, also dealt with memory in an in-depth way, but in "Requiem", he gives us the added gift of a seed of doubt in the narrator's truthfulness, which has the effect of creating a compelling dissonance for the rest of the ride. The final chapter is a speculative conclusion, three years hence, and it is an unexpected device that serves the narrative well. Dufresne's Johnny has grown up with the notion that parallel existences are necessary to achieve happiness, and that notion serves him to the end.
John Dufresne first captivated me with "Louisiana Power & Light," leading me to seek out all of his fictional offerings, as I will continue to do for the rest of ever. Ten thumbs up. :-)
Amen July 5, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Childhood, heartbreak, mental illness, infidelity, roadtrips, hope, tragedy, dysfunction, identity, religion, physics, personal history...you name it and John Dufresne has jammed it into this wise and wistful novel about Johnny, an adolescent struggling to keep his family together. There's comedy too, sure. Readers always remark on Dufresne's sly wit, his ability to create memorable characters living in bizarre circumstances, his chronicling of dark secrets. But Dufresne's humor is more in the tradition of Saul Bellow than Don Rickles: the inevitable result of complex, deep pain -- often self-inflicted -- rather than an overt tickling of your funny bone.
And the prose! Man, can Dufresne WRITE. Every page offers rich rewards for those who love inspired, unaffected sentences. Check out this doozy of a passage from page 100:
"But I was still writing [...] in the morning, even after I'd changed pens, drunk a pot of coffee, switched ink from black to peacock blue, walked around the block, seen the sunrise, put away the Office Depot tablet and the used the Evidence-brand tablet. So I stopped writing and read an essay on Atlantic salmon by Edward Behr. The author was visiting salmon farms along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick. I came to the clause, 'we drove a few minutes along the unspoiled shore,' and I suddenly saw very clearly from his road an unmentioned whitewashed house at the top of a treeless hill overlooking a rocky, wave-tossed cove, and I realized that I had been there, and I knew what Behr did not, that the house, long abandoned by its family, had been converted to a restaurant, and I remembered the dark and rusted interior, the cozy bar, the linen tablecloths on the pine tables in the two small dining rooms, one a step higher than the other, the print of Theodore Rousseau's 'Market in Normandy' over the mantel, a crackling fire in the fireplace, the fragrance of cedar logs."
In a few brief strokes, through a balance of carefully chosen details and honest introspection, Dufresne captures everything that this book's about: frustration, storytelling, struggle, imagination, sensory engagement, memory, searching, travel, correcting, connecting, and the quest for comfort.
I can't recommend this book enough. When you're finished and have fallen in love with the narrator Johnny (and the author John), I strongly suggest you check out his wonderful short story collection "Johnny Too Bad."
GREAT READ -- DON'T MISS IT July 4, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I opened this book to three different places at random,and I laughed out loud each time. "Requiem, Mass." is hilarious and brilliant, with great emotional depth -- John Dufresne at his best!
Rebecca Emerick
|
|
|
