PENTHOUSE F

Book ID/图书代码： 12802011B46655

English Summary/英文概要： Penthouse F takes the form of an inquiry into the suicide, which may or may not be a murder, of a young boy and girl who took up residence in the protagonist/Author’s (of the same name, Richard Kalich) apartment in Manhattan. Using the interrogations of various figures in the fictional Kalich’s life, as well as the protagonist’s own philosophical musings, personal documents, and notes on a novel-in-progress, the story of the pair’s end unfolds, becoming more real and more suspect. At the center of this interrogation looms the question: is Kalich responsible? As Brian McHale has written of this fiction, "Right next door to Penthouse F is the closet where the whipper whips his perpetual victim in Kafka’s The Trial. But why travel so far afield for analogues, when there are Americans closer to hand? This is the sort of novel that John Hawkes might have written if he had spent a few years obsessing about the obsolescence of literature and the tyranny of the image. ...Or this is the kind of novel that Ron Sukenick might have written, and in fact did write in Blown Away – a dossier-novel, an archive of documents, some real, some faked, adding up (or not adding up, finally) to a reflection on the way we live now in the society of the spectacle." In this definitive fiction of our time, the internationally acclaimed award-winning novelist, Richard Kalich, is able to undertake a pointed critical examination of an increasingly voyeuristic generation while cautioning against the delusion that the instantaneousness of electronic media can replace the substantiality of genuine human relationship.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 《Penthouse F》以複式樓形的自殺調查作為開場，這可能是一個謀殺疑雲,一對年輕的男女住在了和主人公/作者(與作者同名理查•卡林奇)在曼哈頓的公寓。在這部虛構小說裡卡林奇的生活中的各式人物的遭到了訊問，同時主人公運用自己的哲學思想，身份證明，和小說敘事式的注釋，對結尾處故事的展開，顯得更加具有真實性，令人產生遐想。在審訊中顯現的問題：是克林奇的責任嗎？正如布賴恩•麥克 海爾對這部虛構小說的評論, “在複式樓隔壁的密室裡克林奇的訊問如同Kafka（奧地利小說家卡夫卡）的著作《The Trial》（審判）中那樣，在不停地鞭笞著受害者。但為何偏僻遠行如見不鮮，美國人何時能夠掌控這一切呢？這類小說，約翰•霍克斯或許出，如果不是他花了幾年時間，沉迷於陳舊文學和暴政題材美夢中……或是羅恩•瑟肯尼克也會寫的那類小說題材，但實際上他卻寫了《Blown Away》（零點爆破）——一部檔案類的小說，一個歸檔的檔，部分真實，部分虛構（多多少少）一部折射出我們現今社會生活的景象的小說。” 在這本劃時代的決定性小說裡，國際知名的獲獎小說家理查•克林奇，有膽識地尖銳性批判了日趨增長的熱衷偷窺別人隱私的社會群體，警示那些對於電子媒體可以瞬間可以取代真實的人際關係的錯覺。(sandy)

Awards/获奖情况："If one of the great European intransigents of the last century - say, Franz Kafka or Georges Bataille or Witold Gombrowicz - were around to write a novel about our era of reality tv and the precession of simulacra, the era of Big Brother and The Real World, what would it look like? Well, it might look like Richard Kalich’s PENTHOUSE F, a narrative of sexual (or is it aesthetic?) obsession and closed-circuit television, set in a recognizable twenty-first-century Manhattan but opening onto an interior space that both does and does not belong to our world - a space contiguous with those dark inner rooms that the European avant-gardists took us into. Right next door to PENTHOUSE F is the closet where the whipper whips his perpetual victim in THE TRIAL..."---Brian McHale, is an American literary theorist, a seminal critical figure in post-modern studies, author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Post-Modernism (1992), and The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole (2004).

"A marvelous book. It manages to do with metafiction in a short novel what the great postmodernists like Coover and Barth take five or six hundred pages to do."---Brian Evenson, Director, Creative writing program, Brown University. Author of the novels, THE FATHER OF LIES and THE OPEN CURTAIN.

The review is finally up, here: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/moist

“This is an important work that deserves to be read by everyone interested in serious fiction.” — Marc Lowe, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“[Penthouse F] is akin to the best work of Paul Auster in terms of its readability without sacrificing its intelligence of experiment. […] Kalich delivers afresh, relevant, and enticingly readable work of metafiction.” — American Book Review

“Ghosts haunt this book from first page to last: Dostoevsky, Mallarme, Kafka, Mann, Camus, Pessoa, Gombrowicz–and, oh yes, most perniciously of all, “Kalich.” For he is a man who tortures himself both with the novels he has written and with those he has not. Let us forgive him even if he will not forgive himself, recognizing as we do the one truth of this tale that seems to be beyond doubt: “It was all in his head like everything else about him.” — Warren Motte, World Literature Today

About the Author/作者介绍： 理查•卡林奇出生在紐約。他備受讚譽的小說《The Nihilesthete》出版發行於英國，德國，以色列，丹麥和荷蘭。這部小說在1987年的《費城詢問報》被評論家卡琳•羅馬諾稱為“最具價值的二十四部小說之一”,並被選中代表美國參選法蘭克福圖書博覽會。《The Nihilesthete》被提名為Pen（作家）/ Faulkner Award（福克納獎）, Hemingway Award（海明威獎），National Book Award（美國國家圖書獎）和Pulitzer Prize（普利策獎）。卡林奇和他的孿生兄弟羅伯特共同在紐約開辦電影製作公司。

RICHARD KALICH was born in New York City. His highly celebrated novel The Nihilesthete has received publications in England, Germany, Israel, Denmark and Holland. It was selected by the Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carlin Romano as one of the twenty-four "Most Noteworthy" novels of 1987, and was selected to represent U.S. titles at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Nihilesthete was nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award, the Hemingway Award, a National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Kalich co-heads a film production company with his twin brother Robert in New York City.

Format:HARDCOVER

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