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Girl in Landscape
Unavailable
Girl in Landscape
Unavailable
Girl in Landscape
Audiobook6 hours

Girl in Landscape

Written by Jonathan Lethem

Narrated by David Aaron Baker

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

"Lethem is opening up blue sky for American fiction. . . . He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncatalogued species." -The Village Voice

Only the irrepressibly inventive Jonathan Lethem could weld science fiction and the Western into a mesmerizing novel of exploration and otherness, sexual awakening and loss. At the age of 13 Pella Marsh loses her mother and her home on the scorched husk that is planet Earth. Her sorrowing family emigrates to the Planet of the Archbuilders, whose mysterious inhabitants have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel-and a civilization that baffles and frightens their human visitors.

On this new world, spikily independent Pella becomes an uneasy envoy between two species. And at the same time she is unwillingly drawn to a violent loner who embodies all the paranoid machismo of the frontier ethic. Combining the tragic grandeur of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual tension of Lolita and transporting them to a planet light years away, GIRL IN LANDSCAPE is a tour de force.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 2007
ISBN9780739357248
Unavailable
Girl in Landscape
Author

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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Reviews for Girl in Landscape

Rating: 3.5371178262008733 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

229 ratings13 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It appears necessary that I begin my review with a true story. I was enjoying reading in the pregnant sunshine, robins flirted in the leaves behind me, a gentle breeze stirred the budding trees. I was not, however, enjoying this novel, in fact, I was sighing as I sped along. Suddenly the novel in question was targeted by an Avian Airborne Excrement attack. Now i have experienced the white drops of British sketch comedy before. This was a blast, it nearly tore the book from stunned fingers. I decided it was a sign and stopped for the time being.

    I finished the novel later and it contains the germs of something interesting. Otherwise this is a tale of trans-planetary Western with native inhabitant Archbuilders being substituted for Native Americans. Archbuilders are the remainders of a great civilization who now profess an interest in English and flit about like Shakespeare's Fools, eating each scene with one-liners while the sexual antics of human children "threaten" to unravel the colony. Jesus.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book reminded me of being 13 and discovering classic science fiction. But so much better, at the same time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book started off promising, lagged in the middle, and left off neatly at the end. My first full length work by Lethem. I'm anxious to read Gun, with Occasional Music before the miniseries debuts.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After her mother dies of a brain tumor, 13-year-old Pella and her family emigrate from a nearly uninhabitable future Earth to a colony on the planet of the Arch-Builders in this coming-of-age story.As is typical of many of his literary science fiction novels, Jonathan Lethem is most interested in placing his characters, and his readers, in a bizarre environment and watching how they adapt. In this case, the environment is an alien planet, once the home of an advanced civilization that has now been abandoned and left in ruins by all but a few of its original inhabitants. The aliens are called the Arch-builders because they left immense, now crumbling arches of unknown purpose all over the desert-like landscape. While most of the human colonists take pills to prevent contracting the alien viruses, Pella and her brothers do not, and this leads to her becoming strangely integrated with the planet and its alien life, just as she enters adolescence. She finds that she is able to mentally inhabit the bodies of the household deer -- small, unsatisfactorily described creatures that go everywhere and, apparently, observe everything that happens within the small human community. In this way, she witnesses the animosity and violence displayed toward the aliens, particularly by larger-than-life Efram Nugent, the informal leader of the colony.This novel quietly grew on me. As Pella becomes more integrated with the life of the Arch-builders' planet, she adapts herself to living there in a way that the adults in her community cannot. She and many of the other children become something new. Lethem depicts this transformation slowly, gradually and subtly. At the same time, he unravels a sinister plot of conflict between Nugent, his fellow colonists and the Arch-builders that shares tropes with an old-fashioned Western. There is a lot going on under the surface of this novel, and I think it would benefit from rereading. Like pretty much any other Lethem novel I have read, it takes the genres we are all so familiar with, and contorts them in exciting new ways.Read because I like the author (2013).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pella Marsh is the 13-year-old daughter of a New York politician on a future Earth so environmentally damaged that a trip to Coney Island requires radiation suits. Desperate for a fresh start after her father’s failed re-election bid, her family ships out to the Planet of the Archbuilders, a hospitable world with a small population of friendly native aliens living in the ruins of a once-great civilisation. Shortly before the family is due to leave, her mother dies of a brain tumour, and the family pushes on despite being torn apart by tragedy.Girl in Landscape sounds like it’s going to be a big sci-fi story, but it takes place almost entirely in a tiny human settlement with a population of about a dozen people, with half a dozen Archbuilders passing in and out – friendly creatures described as a mix of fronds, scales and tentacles, with a love of the human language that conveniently lets Lethem write some irritatingly quirky dialogue. (“I’m in a state of anticipation, anticipating statehood,” one says.) Similarly, the planet itself is a mostly featureless landscape, dotted with edible potato-like plants guaranteeing an endless supply of flavourless food. Ancient alien ruins are mentioned in passing, but add little life or colour to proceedings. The story spools out lifelessly, awkwardly detailing friction between Pella’s father and the local big man, ending in an unlikely confrontation between characters I didn’t much care about.I’m buggered if I can figure out what this book is supposed to be about. I suspect it’s some kind of complex allegory, but the narrative was nowhere near interesting enough for me to care what that was. Some of the characters are drawn well – Pella’s father, viewed entirely through her own resentment at his former political career, is interesting – but they sit aimlessly about in the alien landscape with very little to do. The novel is also in some ways meant to be a Western, I suppose, but I’m not exactly sure what Lethem was trying to accomplish in that sense.This is probably the weakest of Lethem’s novels so far. Fortunately, the next up is Motherless Brooklyn, which was his breakout novel, and I expect it to be quite a bit better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Girl in Landscape has been compared to Nabokov's Lolita which I have never read. As a result of my ignorance I was able to read Girl in Landscape without preconceived notions of what it was about. I'm glad I did. This was great in an extremely strange way. When you first meet old-for-her-age thirteen year old Pella Marsh and her family they are getting ready to go to the beach in what you or I would consider ordinary Brooklyn Heights, New York. Only planet Earth has become a post-apoplectic wasteland where exposure to the sun has become too dangerous without complicated protective gear. It has been decided the Marsh family will leave Earth for the Planet of the Arch-builders. Before they can leave Pella's mother is stricken with a brain tumor and quickly dies. Pella, her father and two brothers must travel to the Planet of the Arch-builders without her. This is where things go from odd to downright bizarre. The Planet of the Arch-builders is sparsely populated with a few earthlings, a smattering of Arch-builder aliens and an overabundance of a creature called household deer. Pella's father, a failed politician, has hopes of creating a lawful society on the Planet of the Arch-builders but soon discovers there is an ominous rift between the humans and the aliens. The plot gets darker and darker the deeper into the story you go.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the things that surprised me so much about Girl in Landscape was how well-written the characters were. As someone who was once a 13 year old girl, I thought Jonathan Lethem did a great job with Pella’s voice; she was a convincing, easy to relate to young girl. She was also a shrewd observer of human nature and her family dynamic. Some of my favorite parts of the book were scenes of her interaction with Efram; they were tense and sharp and menacing. I do wish the book had gone into some more detail with the Archbuilders, because they sounded so interesting, but what descriptions there were I found wonderful. This book felt different from other Letham books I’ve read, with more of a western feel (which normally I don’t much care for), but when I think about it, all pioneer stories, whether they’re early American or astral, are bound to have similarities. In all, I really enjoyed reading about Pella and her family, the growing new town, and the Archbuilders.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Fourteen year old Pella Marsh and her two younger brothers move with their failed politician father to a new planet following the death of their mother.The planet is populated by small groups of human settlers, and one human city, as well as by its original occupants the Arch-Builders and the household deer, the former of whom can speak English, and the latter of which are almost ghostly and hard to notice.The humans take pills to ward off a change related to the Arch-Builders that comes on with puberty, but Pella's father doesn't want his children to take the medication, curious to see what will happen.Thinking that perhaps his political experience will be useful, Pella's father settles the family into a small outpost community where, despite seeming friendliness, suspicion is more the norm. Pella soon begins to experience some unusual symptoms, and is disturbed by the leading questions and knowing looks from one of the less than pleasant men in the community.Misunderstandings between species are inevitable, and Lethem's tale of human interaction with each other and with an alien culture is ultimately unsurprisingly dark.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I want to mention, but skip over aspects of Girl in landscape likely to be covered by other reviewers. It certainly stands out because of its genre bending of Western and Science Fiction tale. It is clearly an homage of sorts to The Searchers. It is other aspects of the book that made it very moving to read.It should not be overlooked that it is a wonderful coming-of-age story (or bildungsromane to quote the German literary term). Pella Marsh is a young woman forced to grow up far too quickly and reading her story is like being in her head feeling all those raw hormone-infused teenage emotions. Lethem does a wonderful job writing from a young girl’s perspective. Pella is believable if sometimes unpredictable. There is a wonderful trope of shifting and metamorphosis, becoming something a bit alien after moving to an alien planet. This fits in well as a metaphor of a child becoming an adult in the jarring manner Pella endures.The Marsh children’s mother dies suddenly early in the book as a result of a fast metastasizing brain tumor. This could have easily tanked into V. C. Andrews level sentimentality if it not where for Lethem’s own life experiences. His own mother died in the same manner when he was about Pella’s age so this theme arises frequently in his fiction as it did in almost exactly the same manner in The Fortress of Solitude. His personal experience of this pain lends a certain weight of gravitas to Pella’s story.What struck me most singularly however was Lethem’s near perfect treatment of the group psychology of children and adolescents. The young characters in this book behave so realistically, you may find yourself flashing back to long hot afternoons on the playground. I would recommend reading and discussion of this book to child psychology students, despite its Science Fiction trappings.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    “Girl in Landscape” by Jonathan Letham is the story of a young girl, Pella Marsh, who is forced to become the adult in her family, first in the end of our world and later in an unknown world.There are slivers of truth and insight in this book that pierced my heart. “You shouldn’t talk to someone like they were a baby when the subject was brain tumors, Pella thought. If you thought they were still a baby you shouldn’t discuss brain tumors, and if you didn’t think they were still a baby, you shouldn’t talk that way. But Pella didn’t know how to tell Dr. Flinch to stop.”Thirteen year old Pella has to grow up far faster than she should, and realizes hard truths about her father and the world that is left to them. “Then Pella’s anger overtook her pity. Clement and Diana had betrayed her. It was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew. She was in charge of Clement’s aloneness, but he’d abandoned Pella to hers.”Clement, Pella’s father, is a shell of a man, once powerful, now abandoned by a world that has moved on and by the death of his wife. He is unable to adapt to his circumstances and vacates his position as the head of the household.After the death of Caitlin, the Marsh family leaves post-apocalyptic Earth to a new planet, inhabited by The Archbuilders. Once the family arrives, this novel drifted for me – still showing moments of beauty and truth, but these are buried in the story like the ruins left by previous Archbuilders.The wonder in this book comes through Pella’s eyes, through the clarity she finds about her father, even when consumed by grief.“Clement’s election was something worse, a collective shame, the family entombed like mummies in a sarcophagus of denial, imagining the polls weren’t saying what they were, pretending not to overhear the phone calls, not to feel Clement’s radiant dread. Then a truly pathetic night spent milling in a shabby ballroom, eying monitors, enduring sympathies first masked then slowly unmasked, like a party with the guest of honor gradually dying . Caitlin got drunk at the end, and Clement, unforgivably, didn’t, instead, stood clear-eyed and patronizing with a hand in Caitlin’s hair as if to steady her, gazing self-pityingly off towards some imaginary frontier.”That new frontier held some interest for me, but the real treasure of this book is in Pella’s mind and heart.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The genre-bending Lethem's science-fiction/western novel. Somewhat confused, but redeemed by some very cool ideas and good writing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sumptuously descriptive, but ultimately confounding. The text is a little flowery for my taste although it does a pretty good job of drawing the reader into the story. The major downfall is that the ending makes no sense to me whatsoever. Pella's final actions and statements seem totally unfitted to the rest of her character throughout the book. The sudden change in personality of several of the major characters at the end of the book are shocking (and probably supposed to be so), but the changes also just didn't seem to fit the rest of the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    OK book. I get it, a retelling of John Waynes the Searcers in space stripping the cliches of the western away. But why wouldnt I just watch the far superior movie?