things people have said about the Alice book
shameless self promotion
because the worst person to tell you about a book is the author (and in this case it’s even worse because the author is me), here’s what other people have said about Sketches of Alice.
(do not read too much into the fact that they are all writers, please).
anyway, it might pique your interest, or finally make you click the unsubscribe button.
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I could rant about this book all day. It’s different, it’s realistic, and the way the drama unfolds is pure art. I felt every chapter, and will never forget this masterpiece.
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It reminded me of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, I nominate this book as its successor. It’s a tragic ode to tragic love … profound without being saccharine … I read it compulsively, couldn’t put it down, it was magnetic.’
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Sketches of Alice is a vibe like nothing that I’ve ever experienced. … a page turner from start to finish … Where his last books were supernatural, religious, grandiose, and allegorical even, this one was messy, human, and intimate.
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This story will break your heart. … a love story for romantics, idealists, and realists alike, about two people born in the right place at the wrong time.
… a seamless stream of consciousness that is the trademark of the author. I was particularly impressed with the dialogue in this one. Sporadic in previous works, but heavy here. … despite the absence of quote marks or dialogue tags … [the conversations] never feel forced, contrived, or there for the sake of exposition. The entire narrative is natural, genuine - human.
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Isaac, a young university drop-out, chances upon his highschool History teacher, they chat, walk about an unnamed city, … drawing closer to each other across the bridge of two decades, both somewhat at odds with the world, with modernity, with what they wanted or expected from life … I was reminded of Before Sunrise, that same sense of two lives briefly intersecting, making a kind of improvised music for a few unrepeatable hours.
Jazz is part of this strange, lovely story, appropriately enough since it has a jazz-like sense of spontaneity... headlong, irresistible passion & obsession animates the prose and the protagonist.
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…beautiful little book. …a portrait of an artist’s awakening, told as a jazz lament about star-crossed lovers. The book is infused with jazz references, including particular tracks. Laeth has even compiled a playlist for this novel, which I found interesting to listen to as I read …
For those familiar with Laeth’s other work, this is at least superficially a departure. Here there are none of his earlier supernatural themes, and the prose itself is much less reflective, stripped down and direct.
…the novel is a double narrative. The real subject is not Alice, it’s [the protagonist’s] love for her and interpretation of her, and his fixation on rendering her again and again in memory and art.
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Alice is at once the beautiful older history teacher, the guardian of classic forms in both her tastes and her manners, and the embodiment of a world that is disappearing.
The descriptive aspect of the book in general is really good. The settings and minor characters were woven in in the right amount and not overbearing.
The ending caught me off guard … it can be interpreted in a variety of bittersweet ways …there’s really a sense to this book of it wanting to come out of the author.
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