Subject: FREMDER by Russell Hoban

From: "Evelyn C Leeper" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Jul 1997 18:46:03 GMT

FREMDER by Russell Hoban
        Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0-224-04370-6, 1996, 184pp, L14.99
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1997 Evelyn C. Leeper

     In the 21st century (a very different 21st century than that of Greg
Egan's DISTRESS, though they take place in only three years apart),
Fremder Gorn is found floating in space sans space suit, sans helmet, sans
everything--everything but life that is.  This is considered strange, even
in Gorn's universe of spaceports with robot sweepers under noctolux lamps
cleaning up under signs saying "Mikhail's Quiksnak" and "Q-Bo Sleep."
Fremder Gorn's quest to find out how he came to be floating in space also
involves finding out what happened to his mother, a famous inventor, and
the almost predictable interaction with mysterious government agencies et
al.

     But Hoban is not so much a novelist as a poet.  His classic RIDDLEY
WALKER proves he has an eye for language and sounds rarely found in
science fiction, and even his narratives written in more standard language
(KLEINZEIT, THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ, THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY,
PILGERMANN, and TURTLE DIARY are the ones I know of) are more novel-length
free verse than prose.  I'm sure some lit-crit major will explain that
there are strict rules for free verse that this doesn't meet.  But to my
untutored ear, a sentence like "I've always considered sleep after
lovemaking more intimate than the lovemaking: getting through the night
together, lying embraced until an arm becomes numb, then lying together
like two spoons until sleep doesn't come that way, then turning backs and
reverting to aloneness together and the snores, farts, and sleep seemed to
have no rest: she mumbled laughed, cursed, quoted from the Bible,
sometimes in a voice that seemed different from her own."  This is a book
that cries out for a reading by the author.

     Anyone who has read any of Russell Hoban's works will immediately
want to know how to get a copy of this, his latest and perhaps most
traditional science fiction book.  This is not to say that it is
traditional by any normal definition of the term, of course.
Unfortunately for us USans, this is available only in a British edition,
and it will probably be a while before it crosses the Atlantic--assuming
it ever does.  Why do I latch on to authors who are impossible to find
here?  Of his other works I mentioned, only RIDDLEY WALKER, a
post-holocaust novel, and PILGERMANN, a first-person story by a Jew during
the Crusades, perhaps best described as magical realism, have been
published in the United States, where Hoban is known primarily as an
author of children's books.  His others--KLEINZEIT, an eventful and
mysterious day in the life of its eponymous hero, THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN
AND JACHIN-BOAZ, a quest for lions in a country that *seems* to be modern
England, THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY, involving the talking head of Orpheus and a
Vermeer portrait, and TURTLE DIARY are the ones I know of--seem to be
available only in British editions from Picador.

      Now that I've pulled his other books off the shelf to refer to them,
I want to go back and re-read them all.

%T      Fremder
%A      Russell Hoban
%C      London
%D      1996
%I      Jonathan Cape
%O      hardback, L14.99
%G      ISBN 0-224-04370-6
%P      184pp

Evelyn C. Leeper    |  [email-masked]
+1 732 957 2070     |  http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
Life is not a "brief candle."  It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn
as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.  -- GBS