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Glimpses Lewis Shiner 9780312267438 Books

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Glimpses Lewis Shiner 9780312267438 Books

A powerful exploration of how and why music is so integral to the human experience. The mechanics of the main character's time travel/magic record ability is a little fuzzy and never adequately explained, though I'm sure Shiner tried his best. I guess the biggest problem I had with this is the same complaint I've had for so many other protagonists in novels I've read this year: instead of being heroes, they're all resigned to personal defeat in one way or another. Main characters aren't much in the hero department any more. The Brian Wilson section is probably the most interesting, but there's a strange meandering that happens in the next portion of the book. He decides to go to the Caribbean without his wife to investigate the suicide of his long deceased father and hooks up with a woman who plays the typical 'I'll Only End Up Hurting You' game with him. Am I the only one in the crowd of readers who never cared about his father's suicide and just wanted to continue seeing him try to change the fates of famous musicians? The daddy issues almost dragged this book down into morass.


Tags : Glimpses [Lewis Shiner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>Ray Shackleford lives in the ruins of the idealistic 1960s. Veteran of failed garage bands, he works as a repairman of stereo equipment,Lewis Shiner,Glimpses,St. Martin's Griffin,0312267436,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction General,General,Modern fiction

Glimpses Lewis Shiner 9780312267438 Books Reviews

If you're a fan of the sixties, and in particular a fan of the music scene back then, you're probably going to love this soft, bittersweet sci-fi foray into the past. Very well-written. I withheld a star for reasons I cannot, for reasons of potential story spoilage, share. But I enjoyed it.
What would you do if you had the power to change the past, rescuing unwrought works of music from non-existence? I'd see that Syd Barrett stayed sober and sane enough for a 2nd album with songs on the level of Pink Floyd's debut. The progression here goes from music by the Beatles and Beach Boys to attempts to prevent Jimi Hendrix from dying.

The only drawback to this riveting tale is the personal soap opera of the protagonist. And I do mean soap opera! His marital problems get really tiresome. The whole subplot could have been axed and resulted in a more streamlined story.
The first three years after discovering Glimpses by Lewis Shiner I read it once a year, which doesn't happen to me very often in reading a book.

Ray Shackleford is a stereo repairman with problems. A father with whom he had a contentious relationship has died under mysterious circumstances, his marriage is unraveling like a ball string in his fingers and he can't quite grasp the threads to pull it back together, a burgeoning drinking problem, and a career as a rock star that never got started much less going anywhere. But he has discovered a means of escape, by retreating into the past, and not just any past, he retreats to the 60's to help the idols of his Rock `n' Roll dreams reclaim what they've lost, their lost albums. Brian Wilson's Smile, Jim Morrison and The Celebration of the Lizard, and Jimi Hendrix's The First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

I first read this book because I was looking for a nice escapist book to lose myself in for a few hours. I found that. The more I read the more I found myself drawn in, especially to Ray's trips to the past, his getting drawn into Brian Wilson's family, living the Rock `n' Roll lifestyle with Jim Morrison as his guide, and Ray's truly heartbreaking attempts to keep Jimi Hendrix from dying. The question is will these trips to the past help Ray heal the same issues he has in his life?

There is the element of time travel in this book. Is Ray really going back into the past and meeting his idols? Or is he suffering a series of strokes? Glimpses offers evidence of both, giving the reader the choice of which is truly occurring.

On each reading of Glimpses, I found something new in it, some nuance previously undiscovered. I guess one could say that is due to the changing circumstances of my life. But isn't that the mark of any good book? That we can find something new in it from whatever perspective in life we are coming at it?
GLIMPSES was Lewis Shiner's 4th novel, published in 1993. The protagonist, Ray, a late 30s ex-drummer and now full time musical equipment repair guy discovers that he has the ability to imagine music that might have been, but never was, and not only get it to play out of a stereo system, but actually be recorded. When he plays a recording of "The Long and Winding Road" the way if would have sounded before Phil Spector got his hands on the master tapes for the owner of a Rhino Records type company that releases old bootlegs and rare outtakes and the like from 1960s era bands, he gets talked into trying to first recreate the rumored but never actually recorded "Celebration of the Lizard" by the Doors. There is a segment on Brian Wilson's begun in 1966 but then abandoned "Smile", and a final one about Jimi Hendrix's "The First Rays of the New Rising Sun. In between and at the end there is a lot of not particularly interesting stuff about Ray's relationships with his father, mother, wife and past and present girlfriends.

The writing is OK but not particularly poetic and the pacing is best described as languid. If one is interested in the history of the Doors, Beach Boys and Jimi they will probably like this novel. The Brian Wilson segment is the best (and also the weirdest, as Ray time travels back to 1966 and Brian's Hollywood mansion a lá the movie "Somewhere in Time"), and the Hendrix segment the weakest (perhaps because I cared the most about it and as a 60 year old guitarist, knew more about Hendrix's music and life than I did about the Doors or the Beach Boys).

And, being written in 1992 or 1993, the author could not have anticipated that "Smile" would actually have been completed by Brian Wilson in 2004, and "First Rays of the New Rising Sun" compiled and released in the late 1990s, followed by a Spector-removed version of "Let itBe". None is very much as described in the novel but one can hardly fault the author for that. Music fans like me who were there when this all went down might like it or not, depending on their degree of familiarity with the source material, but I think that the best audience might be the next generation who heard about these bands but were not there when they were playing live and who didn't grow up steeped in 1960s rock and roll culture.

Not bad, especially for the price, but not awesome either. It was OK.

J.M. Tepper
A powerful exploration of how and why music is so integral to the human experience. The mechanics of the main character's time travel/magic record ability is a little fuzzy and never adequately explained, though I'm sure Shiner tried his best. I guess the biggest problem I had with this is the same complaint I've had for so many other protagonists in novels I've read this year instead of being heroes, they're all resigned to personal defeat in one way or another. Main characters aren't much in the hero department any more. The Brian Wilson section is probably the most interesting, but there's a strange meandering that happens in the next portion of the book. He decides to go to the Caribbean without his wife to investigate the suicide of his long deceased father and hooks up with a woman who plays the typical 'I'll Only End Up Hurting You' game with him. Am I the only one in the crowd of readers who never cared about his father's suicide and just wanted to continue seeing him try to change the fates of famous musicians? The daddy issues almost dragged this book down into morass.