Love Among the Particles by Norman Lock

Love Among the Particles Reviews

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  Full Stop

  
  http://www.full-stop.net/2013/07/16/r...
  
  Review by Nathan Weatherford
  
  Norman Lock’s short story collection Love Among the Particles has a wonderful sense of literary and historical irreverence. Many of the stories find Lock inserting himself into their fictional worlds, rendering himself one more character in a veritable menagerie of fictional and non-fictional personages of note from Mr. Hyde to Mata Hari. In fact, the stories in this collection feel quite deliberately selected to provoke the reader into an acknowledgement — and hopefully, a studied consideration — of the ineluctable strangeness of existence, in all its historical and fictional glory.
  
  I can’t think of another author who takes such evident, vocal delight in bending the laws of physics and geography (to say nothing of his flouting of various narratological and fictional norms). You can feel the joy leaping off the page in passages like this one in “The Brothers Ascend”: “Dayton had been a pleasant town dreaming slow river dreams in unending sunshine. Before the sun disappeared from the sky. I rode now on my Wright brothers bicycle to the river, to listen to it sing among the stones, and saw Huck and Jim fetch up in a raft.” And Lock not only writes these beautiful flights of fancy into his stories, he crows about his license to do so, offering a lyrical “why not?” to every raised eyebrow in the room:
  
  You shout, Liar! Theirs was the Mississippi River, which is not in Ohio.
  
  I reply imperturbably, Maybe not in any geography book. But the Mississippi that runs through mythology, the Mississippi of the imagination — that river lapped the green shores of Dayton. Was beaten into foam by the brightly painted paddle wheels of steamers. Was — after years of naive sunshine — surprised at the sudden dark.
  
  Read more here:
  http://www.full-stop.net/2013/07/16/r...
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  Jeff

  I got this book as a freebie extra from a publisher when I got an Early Review Book last year. It is a collection of short stories and I started reading it with no expectations.
  
  It was an interesting mix of stories. They had a slightly surrealistic, gothic bent. The first story; "The Monster in Winter" was an interesting twist on Jeykll and Hyde, where Hyde is in jail and a producer is trying to interview him to put on a stage play. The "Ideas of Space" is a man whose society lives among the trees and what happens to him when he comes out onto the vast plains.
  
  The last 3 stories are a triptych called "A Broken Man's Complaint", it includes the title story. Its about a man (an author loosely based on Cook) who finds himself (in a Kafka'ist way) broken up into his constituent atom, quarks, gluons, but is somehow still sentient. He finds himself disconnected from time and space and the stories explore what it means to be "human", how to find love, and how to survive in a new world. Very interesting.
  
  "...on a morning unremarkable except for a cloud edged strangely by phosphorescence in an otherwise ordinary summer sky, I was transformed from a man in his middle age with a mustache, slouch, and an awkward gait to a collation of sentient particles of uncertain age that move with the genius possessed by all gregarious flying things to rise, turn and settle as one." - Love Among the Particles
  
  "The river was greater even than my idea of it had been. I envied its disdain and the ease of its procession through space. Nothing stood in the way of its ends, which it attained single-mindedly. It spent itself in its solitary bed without love or recompense, obedient to ice and thaw, drought and freshet, indifferent to its own futility" - Ideas of Space
  
  7/10
  
  S: 3/30/16 - F: 4/10/16 (12 Days)
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  Tobias

  I am, admittedly, not entirely unobjective when it comes to this novel. But it's an excellent look at what makes Lock's work terrific, from the metafictional to the confessional to the straight-up unsettling.
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  Jess

  I didn't care for the style of writing. The couple of stories I read were very dissociative, seeming to try to create an aura of wonder when they only created confusion because the endings had no impact, just dissipated. I left this on the subway for someone else to find.
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  Nafiza

  Remarkably self-indulgent. I don't like it when the author is so strongly present in the story that the story cannot breathe.
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  EditorialEyes

  Read about half of this. While the stories are interesting in premise, ultimately the author's voice wasn't enough to make me want to keep going. Somewhat pretentious and self-indulgent.
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  Jan Moens

  8/10