Echo Mountain (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

How far must one man descend before he contemplates looking up? For talented writer James Nichelson, the lost days are measured in drained whisky bottles, severed unions, and squandered days. So frames Echo Mountain, a tale of loss and elusive redemption told with profound emotional resonance and exquisite craft by first-time novelist W. Wayne Arrants. After his beloved Bren tosses James aside to marry Jonathan, the struggling writer steals a final kiss—or parting shot—on the eve of a seemingly idyllic southern wedding. James, or AJ as he’s often called, then beats it to New York City, to submerge his shattered heart in a rapid secession of shots at Free Fallin’, the Upper East Side bar in Manhattan where he bartends. James also finds a bit of cold comfort in the company of Crystal, an ex-dancer and fellow bartender who rivals both his addition and cynicism. What James does not know is the events of his pre-nuptial secret seduction of Bren have changed his destiny in more ways than his murky and booze-addled brain can suppose. As it is, he can hardly make sense of the free-flowing fragments of past and present that surge through his compromised consciousness. It will take the death of his father and a personal reckoning to spur an even more precipitous descent—and ultimately a discovery of rock bottom and redemption. Every step of the way, his bumpy road is informed by his razor-sharp sensibilities as an artist; past events that seem irreconcilable; and newfound loves that transcend his course of self-destruction. When James returns to the low country of South Carolina to attend his father’s funeral, he discovers an inheritance that promises to free him to finally realize his literary ambitions. What he has not accounted for are the demons that threaten to paralyze his creativity forever. Through the smoky-peat haze of liquor and loss, his beloved niece Tyler discovers a Pandora’s box that contains the fragments of her uncle’s life and loss. An elegiac stream-of-conscious work of fiction, Echo Mountain breaks stunning ground in a portrait of one artist’s psyche. Layered with literary allusions, pop song lyrics, and lists of daily existence, this virtuosic pastiche samples the high and the low, the fine and the feral, to put forth one tortured soul—and point up the hope for personal redemption in us all. A story of addiction, destiny, and recovery, Echo Mountain achieves new literary heights—by fearlessly mining one human’s depths.