His entry begins:I am reading a book of Japanese Poetry translated by Kenneth Rexroth. While not particularly a fan of his school of poetry, I have found that his translations are eye-popping, perhaps precisely because he has no interest in antiquity, or in much literal meaning, only in sound and sense. Thus, his ancient Greek poetry collection knocked my socks off. Similarly this collection took me out of a very bad mood last week in Seattle. A poem I have known for a long time...[read on]About The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, from the publisher:
1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the breakup with her longtime lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in different eras.Learn more about the book and author at Andrew Sean Greer's website and follow him on Facebook.
During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and alternate lives in 1918, where she is a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, which transforms her into a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.
As her final treatment looms, questions arise: What will happen once each Greta learns how to remain in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to stay in which life?
Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells beautifully imagines "what if" and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.
Writers Read: Andrew Sean Greer.
--Marshal Zeringue
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