Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

Perpetual motion ; gentleman death / Graeme Gibson ; introduction by Margaret Atwood.

by Gibson, Graeme, 1934-2019.

View full image

McClelland & Stewart 2020.

Penguin modern classics.

9780771057762 (trade pbk.)

Alternate title:

Gentleman death

Penguin modern classics edition.

546 p. ; 21 cm.

Perpetual motion, c1982 ; Gentleman death, c1993.

Perpetual motion -- Gentleman death.

Perpetual Motion. First published in 1982, Perpetual Motion is Graeme Gibson's superb evocation of a time when faith in material progress is still challenged by superstition and a lingering belief in magic. It is an ironic yet compassionate examination of the painful consequences of human folly. Set in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century when the machine age was coming into its own, Perpetual Motion chronicles the fortunes of settler Robert Fraser, a man obsessed with power and control. Driven by the idea of inventing a perpetual motion machine which will utilize natural energy, he neglects and destroys not only the nature around him but his own family too, as his overbearing rationality becomes a kind of tragic lunacy.

Gentleman Death: Novelist Robert Fraser comes face-to-face with creativity, his mortality, and the deaths of his father and brother. Set mainly in Toronto, the novel also takes us to London, Scotland, Germany, and New York as we follow the escapades of two of Fraser's fictional characters. There is Simpson, called into service as an anonymous sperm donor, and Dunbar, an enigmatic tourist in Berlin just before the Chernobyl disaster, where he meets the captivating Lena, with whom he begins to sense an almost forgotten freedom and elation. But at the centre of Gentleman Death is Robert Fraser's own compelling story. Gibson juxtaposes reality and fiction in this compassionate, sometimes outrageous, often very funny exploration of the absurdities and alarms of aging, the nature of fiction itself, and the maturity that grows from reconciliation.

Canadian fiction.

Classic fiction.

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal