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Resumen
Resumen
The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his mentally handicapped younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea. Ares comes to understand and embrace the uneasy relationship between selfhood and the responsibilities of familial love.
Notas del autor
Marisa Silver made her fictional debut in "The New Yorker". She has previously worked as a feature film director & lives in Los Angeles.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reseñas (4)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
An elegantly observed coming-of-age story steeped in poverty and violence, this novel by the author of No Direction Home offers a poignant and often heartbreaking account of Ares Ramirez. The year is 1978, and 12-year-old Ares has outgrown the cramped trailer in the California desert that he shares with his mother, Laurel, and six-year-old brother, Malcolm. Malcolm has profound developmental disabilities, but Laurel, out of a free-spirited and self-righteous view of motherhood, has only recently (and very reluctantly) allowed Malcolm to get treatment. A horrific childhood accident and encroaching adolescence, meanwhile, fill Ares with a potent and inarticulate anger. In the absence of any outlet for his preoccupation with violence, Ares falls into an uneasy friendship with Kevin, the troubled foster child of Malcolm's new speech therapist. Conflict with Laurel, her on-again-off-again boyfriend and a small community that will not accept Malcolm, drive Ares into Kevin's manipulative sway, and Ares will have to choose between protecting his family or embracing the violence building inside him. The characters are painted with compassion and unflinching honesty, and the climax is pithy and consequential. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Reseña de Booklist
The Salton Sea seems like a mirage in the vast Southern California desert, but in 1978 it is a real, if endangered, sanctuary for pelicans, fish, and a ragtag little family. Ares, Silver's utterly beguiling, fatherless narrator, tells the haunting story of his traumatic twelfth year. In spite of his youth, he is the man of the house, tending to Malcolm, his six-year-old half brother, who has severe learning disabilities. Ares believes he caused Malcolm's condition, and he endures ridicule and violence as his brother's protector in their drug-stoked outlaw town, while Laurel, a terrible mother and a mystic in denial, alienates her current lover, a Vietnam vet the boys adore. The school librarian is the only adult whom lonely and responsible Ares trusts, but her volatile foster son very nearly destroys Ares' already precarious life. The author of No Direction Home (2005), Silver writes lyrically of family crises exacerbated by mental debilities, exquisitely evoking a land of natural beauty and human menace and mindscapes both shadowed and bright in an emotionally complex and unpredictable novel that insists on an all-at-once read.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
THE Salton Sea is a lake, saltier than the ocean, that lies about 85 miles east of San Diego. Fish and birds flock there for sustenance; they also die there in huge numbers, victims of the lake's high saline content and, some say, its toxicity. A bleak landscape, baking under the remorseless sun of the Colorado Desert, it's a strange, lonesome place. And in her new novel, "The God of War," Marisa Silver has filled it with strange, lonesome people. The members of a beleaguered little family are crammed into a corroded trailer: a worried 12-year-old boy, his feckless hippie mother and his little brother, who "could not talk or read or write, was more at home with objects than people, and could not look a person in the eye or suffer a stranger's hand on his narrow shoulder without screaming as if he had been branded." The year is 1978. Silver's narrator, Ares, has a small room to himself, but his brother's breathing and his mother's movements are audible through the flimsy plywood walls. It wouldn't matter, though, if he had all the space - and all the solid barriers - in the world. Ares would still be haunted by an accident that took place when his brother, Malcolm, was a baby: Ares dropped him on his head in a parking lot, causing, Ares is convinced, his brother's present condition. Don't look for relief from this painful preoccupation in Silver's writing. Offering no shelter, her descriptions are spare, appropriate to her scorched-earth setting. "I heard the thud of his head hit the concrete," Ares says, recalling his brother's fall, "before he rolled lazily off the lip of the island and onto the cracked pavement. He came to rest beside the wheels of the car." Ares's private stations of the cross are described in a stripped-down, relentless fashion. He goes to school, where he has no friends and must defend his brother against everyone, even the special-education teacher who's meant to be helping Malcolm. Ares tries to avoid the brutalities of the local bullies. He goes into the desert with his brother, where they play war games and yell at birds, one of Malcolm's only forms of verbal communication. This narrow world opens up a bit when the school librarian begins to tutor Malcolm at her home: while she tries to teach his brother to speak, Ares hangs around her comfortable ranch house, marveling at its normalcy. Ares's mother has a boyfriend who lives at nearby Slab City, the decommissioned Army base turned squatter's village documented so memorably in Sean Penn's film "Into the Wild." "Slab City wasn't really a city," Ares explains. "It was a place for people who liked to get away with things." I'm probably being unfair, but it was frustrating to have the vibrant images from the film playing in my mind as I read Silver's brief account of this odd place, a contrast that underscored the withholding quality of her prose. Yet this tough, tight style suits the material well. "The God of War" is preoccupied with an all-too-common subject: one sibling who cares for and feels responsible for another. Silver pairs this subject with a second, the child of a broken household who feels responsible for his family's fractures. Twined together, they acquire more urgency - and more contemporary relevance. Children with autism and Down syndrome are now living longer and healthier lives, sometimes surviving their parents, and in the process creating greater responsibilities for their siblings. Thus Ares's account of defining himself through and against his brother transcends its time and place. The novel's other concern - the caretaker child of divorce - is timely as well. Americans born in the 1960s and '70s have grown up, and as they have children of their own they look back at those rebellious years, considering how they themselves were raised. In a time when parents were "finding themselves," children were sometimes forced to play adult roles. And yet, although these social issues frame and enrich our appreciation of Ares's experiences, Silver has written a book that's the opposite of a "problem" novel. Far from a polemicist, she lets the details of her storytelling subtly suggest its larger implications. In "The God of War," seemingly insignificant moments, carefully observed, are used to scavenge value and insight from the neglected and the obscure. Marisa Silver's novel fills a strange, lonesome place with strange, lonesome people. Claire Dederer is at work on a memoir about yoga and motherhood.
Library Journal Review
Responsible for his handicapped younger brother, 12-year-old Ares Ramirez is also pulled toward the world of drugs. Hugely important, insists the publicist. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.