Scorpio Rising"Scorpio Rising" starts with an enigmatic first line, "I'm going to run the home movie again. Unlike the Egyptian mummy, I ain't pressed for time." A young man is visiting his dusty Texas home town, standing over the grave sites of his grandparents and other relatives. Another clue to the plot comes next, "In a corner of the cemetery, no marker at head or foot, raked out flat and overrun with agarita and scrub cedar and mountain laurel alongside the rusty barbed-wire fence, is another grave. It's been there seventy years or so. You can make it out: the outline still shows. The body was buried eight feet deep. A little closer to Hell than all the rest." As soon as that enigmatic scene is set, we're soon taken to a very different location, just as evocatively rendered. Rudy, the novel's narrator, is a twenty three year old living in a small town in the Berkshires, longing for love from his platonic pal Lita. Lita and her daughter Pearl are as close to family as Rudy has; the scenes between them achingly depict the loneliness of unrequited love. Rudy is called home to Texas. At this point the novel shifts again, in ways that will have you turning back the pages and reading again to make sure you understand what's happened. I leave that to the reader to enjoy. Just as soon as we get to know Rudy intimately (I loved these sections), the novels shifts back from 1976 to the early part of the century. The graves whom Rudy visited in the opening chapter belonged to the characters who are now living and breathing: Victoria Ann, aunt Velma, and Victoria's parents. At first I wasn't on board for this radical shift. I so enjoyed Rudy and Lita and the 1970s setting that I could have read an entire novel about them. But as soon becomes apparent, this shift to the past is the whole point of the novel. To say more would be to ruin many of the novel's surprises. And to dwell on the plot is to miss the real charm of "Scorpio Rising"--Its evocative prose. Vliet was a stylist on par with best contemporary American authors. Both turn-of-the-century Texas and Carter-era New England are rendered with a masterly brushstroke.--Review by Alex Nichols @ Amazon.com. |
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