The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests - Softcover

Paul West is the author of more than 20 novels and

a dozen works of non-fiction, most recently A Fifth of November, about the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes, and Master Class, a memoir of an MFA seminar. West’s awards include the Lannan Prize for Fiction, the Literature Prize of the American Academy, and the designation of Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the government of France. He studied at Oxford and Columbia Universities, and

in 2000 received the first Art-of-Fact Prize offered by the State University of New York.

Shapeless and overlong but ultimately compelling, West's new novel is a portrait of a difficult genius. George The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests is an aging Hopi Indian who's spent his life carving kachina dolls, wooden images of deified ancestors. His interior monologues and conversations with his ostensible nephew, Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill, dominate the first half of the book. Oswald's graphic experiences as an actor in pornographic movies in Los Angeles and as an infantryman in Vietnam fill the remainder, and they contrast vividly with the "sovereign slowness of things" envisioned by George and celebrated, perhaps too literally, by West himself. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.