The Book of Getting Even

Be the first to write a review

All Available Formats + Editions

——

$10.68

NOOK Book

——

$10.68

Book of Getting Even (eBook) Pub. Date: 5/20/2008 Publisher: Steerforth Press
$0.01

$14.49

Paperback

$0.01

$14.49

The Book of Getting Even Pub. Date: 2/10/2009 Publisher: Steerforth Press
$0.01

$11.97

Hardcover

$0.01

$11.97

The Book of Getting Even Pub. Date: 5/20/2008 Publisher: Steerforth Press

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Advertising

Overview

Son of a rabbi, budding astronomer Gabriel Geismar is on his way from youth to manhood in the 1970s when he falls in love with the esteemed and beguiling Hundert family, different in every way from his own. Over the course of a decade-long drama unfolding in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and the Wisconsin countryside, Gabriel enters more and more passionately and intimately into the world of his elective clan, discovering at the inmost center that he alone must bear the full weight of their tragedies, past and present. Yet The Book of Getting Even is funny and robust, a novel rich in those fundamentals we go to great fiction for: the exploration of what is hidden, the sudden shocks, the feeling at last of life laid bare.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Rich with both laughter and pain, Taylor's novel is a different sort of love story, elegantly written and deeply satisfying.

The history of mathematics holds many distinguished names, but three stand out: Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. The son of a rabbi, a self-described cosmologist and budding astronomer, Gabriel Geismar intends to make that trio a quartet. As he travels the path from youth to manhood during the turbulent '70s, Gabriel's journey is one of drama, discovery, and bittersweet humor. From his home in New Orleans to college in Philadelphia, his passion has always resided in the sweet detachment and unchangeable rules of mathematics. Integers, fractions, and primes were his family and his connection, not his angry father or his loving but timid mother -- each, all too sadly, the other's misfortune.

But at college, Gabriel finds a new and more potent connection -- a true home, his rightful place -- within the eccentric Hundert clan. The twins, Danny and Marghie, become his friends; their parents, brilliant intellectuals, are the family he should have had. This is his proper inheritance; theirs is a marriage the way it's supposed to be; and here is the thoughtful and intelligent exchange of views he has longed for. However, as the years pass, Gabriel's deepening attachment and greater intimacy with his elective family reveal that it is he, the outsider, who must bear the tragedy and sadness at their very core. (Fall 2008 Selection)

Publishers Weekly

In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid-20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's "intergenerational rancor." (May)

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

Library Journal

This elegiac novel features the long, tragic friendship of three young people coming of age in the 1970s. They meet as undergraduates at Swarthmore and begin their adult lives full of promise. By the end of the novel, that promise has given way to sadness, regret, and defeat, mainly because of bad choices. All three protagonists are skillfully rendered. Daniel and Marghie are fraternal twins, children of a Nobel prize-winning physicist, while Gabriel is the son of a rabbi from New Orleans. Although parts of the novel would have benefited from further development, much here is beautifully drawn: Gabriel's failed or unrealized romantic relationships prove especially poignant. These young people also lose their parents, and Taylor handles these passages with eloquence and pathos. This is a novel about friendship, loneliness, and the hazards adults encounter as they make their way in the world. Although not without its flaws, it nonetheless has much to offer. Recommended for libraries with large fiction collections.
—Patrick Sullivan

Kirkus Reviews

Taylor's second novel (Tales Out of School, 1995) is an inconsequential story, with considerable pretensions, about a brainy gay Jewish astronomy student, his brainy best friends (twins) and their super-brainy parents. Gabriel Geismar is a mama's boy with an overbearing father, a rabbi in New Orleans. Gabriel loves numbers, especially as they relate to the cosmos; his other love is male bodies, which he satisfies by visiting a bathhouse. Deliverance from the rabbi comes in 1970, when he wins a scholarship to Swarthmore, outside Philadelphia, and meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, fraternal twins, who both fall in love with him; he reciprocates Danny's love, while Marghie becomes his big sister. The movie buff (Marghie) and the pacifist (Danny) are the children of Gregor Hundert, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, along with other Hungarian Jews, developed the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Gabriel is in seventh heaven when the courtly, old-world parents take a shine to him: These, surely, are his rightful parents, not the rabbi and the rebbetzin, whose deaths are described with arch humor. The story meanders through the '70s. Gabriel becomes a professor of astrophysics. Love affairs founder. Gabriel and Marghie ease their solitude with imaginary helpmates. Neither one is a fully formed, knowable character. We don't know Danny either, though he defines himself in spectacular fashion, first by his vow of silence to protest the Vietnam war, then by his attempt to assassinate Kissinger. This was Danny's project: "To get even. With the big perpetrators." It's hard to square it with the words from the Bhagavad Gita which are his father's mantra: "[T]he good deeds a man has done defend him." Gregorseems mocked by that mantra too, as he slips into dementia. The novel ends in irony and ambiguity as Gabriel, a more reliable "son" than the incarcerated Danny, scatters Gregor's ashes in Budapest. An intellectual peep show whose ultimate meaning remains elusive. Agent: Wendy Strothman/The Strothman Agency

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781581952322
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Publication date: 2/10/2009
Pages: 176
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.45 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Benjamin Taylor is the author of the novel Tales Out of School, which won the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize and is available in paperback from Zoland Books, an imprint of Steerforth Press. He is editor of The Letters of Saul Bellow, scheduled for publication in 2010. His travel memoir, Naples Declared, will be published in 2011. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Be the first to write a review

( 0 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines

Tell the world what you think of this product.

Add Recommendations

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

- HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
- Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
- Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
- Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
- Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
- Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
- Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
- See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble