Book of the Day May 13
Get ready for a jump into hallucinatory LSD dream-/nightmare-writing here. Fox takes his own marriages (to a Peruvian, a Kansan and a Brazilian) and all his years in Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain and the rest of Europe and turns them into what may have begun as autobiographical and turned into fantasy stories.
His immersion in opera, film and theater since he was a kid, along with a fascination for world literature and a special interest (nightly for 7 years!) in French film, transformed Fox from a Chicago-born gremlin into an artistic internationalist. There's also his obsessiveness with ancient archaeology; drawing cultural lines between the ancient Andes and the ancient Middle East. So get ready for trips to Istanbul too, a cultural historian turned fictioneer (referring here especially to the first story in the book, the one that gave the book its name, Camel-Lion).
Tucked inside these pages you’ll also find allusions to Fox's years spent in art galleries; from the Art Institute in Chicago (specializing in French impressionism) to the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the National Gallery in London, the Nelson Atkins gallery in Kansas City—none of them escaped him. Lots of the time you feel you're inside fictionalized art-galleries . . . or classical music concerts ("Salvation").
Let's not forget Fox's childhood and early adulthood captivation with fanatic Irish Catholicism and then later in Judaism, when he discovered the grandmother who had raised him was a hidden Jew ("Suede and Velour") You’ll find Fox always getting to the inner heart of things—a maniacal scholar-artist, as it were.
Always ("Unsprung") you’ll note Fox’s special obsession with his favorite city, Paris . . . the Parisian; the internationalism; cultural history infatuation; an insane fascination for all of the arts, history, archaeology, world-religion all of which he transforms into somewhat autobiographical fiction.
Word Count: 30,000
Pages to Print: 110
Price: $ 3.99
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