Short Lives Audiobook By John Fraser cover art

Short Lives

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Short Lives

By: John Fraser
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
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About this listen

 The latest work of fiction by John Fraser (‘the most original novelist of our time’, John Fuller, Whitbread Award winner and Booker Prize nominee) consists of two stories about aspiration, and how that is suited to a short reflective life, rather than a long happenstance. ‘O the Poor Horses’ tells of a super-athlete, climber and circus star, Pierre, whose aim is to reach the top of the tent, and then beyond – perfection of the body and its mind. When Pierre tumbles and is crippled, Dora, his assistant and companion, once his facilitator who has become a dead weight, must take on the salvation of his aims. They are joined by Julie – there to catch the fallers, and to shoot unruly animals. She and Dora carry the wounded Pierre away, joined by Masha, the horsewoman – an athlete whose speed and direction depend on her horse, only in part her mind and body. ‘Where the Philosophers Go’ concerns Vince – his work, life, fate and reflections. His is a life without direction, without aspiration... He meets everyone from tycoons to avatars, experiences everything, but what is life and where does it go? he asks himself. Is meaning revealed through intensity or is the meaning simply accumulated, in long and random experience? Anonymously, he is recommended a supreme virtue – if the most hollow, and the hardest to pursue – that of loyalty. The distinguished poet, novelist, Whitbread Award winner and Booker Prize nominee John Fuller has written of Fraser’s fiction: “One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus’s forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs. Fraser’s work is conceived on a heroic scale in terms both of its ideas and its situational metaphors. If he were to be filmed, it would need the combined talents of a Bunuel, a Gilliam, a Cameron. Like Thomas Pynchon, whom in some ways he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildly inventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the author bestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly-detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.” Of Fraser’s Animal Tales, Fuller wrote: “It convinces me that he is the most original novelist of our time. His work has become an internal dialogue of intuitions and counter-intuitions that just happens to take the form of conversations between his inscrutable characters. But really it is a rich texture of poetic perceptions, frequently reaching for the aphoristic, but rooted in sidelong debate and weird analogies.” The full text of John Fuller’s article on Fraser is at www.johnfuller-poet.com/johnfraser.htm. For more information on John Fraser, please visit www.johnfraserfiction.com or email info@aesopbooks.com.
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