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    Strange Bodies
    Strange Bodies
    Strange Bodies
    Audiobook10 hours

    Strange Bodies

    Written by Marcel Theroux

    Narrated by Gildart Jackson and Veida Dehmlow

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead.

    In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure.
    With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the listener on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 8, 2014
    ISBN9781494570774
    Strange Bodies
    Author

    Marcel Theroux

    Marcel Theroux is the author of four previous novels: A Blow to the Heart;A Stranger in the Earth;The Paperchase, winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award; and Far North, which was shortlisted for the prestigious National Book Award. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Strange Bodies

    3.5/5

    77 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It starts off with someone waking up in someone else's body then goes places.

      I really enjoyed this genre bending read and what a great framework for a discussion about identity and being human. I don't really know how to describe it without laboriously regurgitating plot chunks except to say that it is both surprising and gripping. A bit sci-fi, a bit dystopian and a bit of mystery thrown in too.

      Well written, good characterisation.
    • 3/5
      Framed as autobiography, Marcel Theroux’s novel Strange Bodies follows disenchanted English academic Nicholas Slopen through a murky labyrinth of literary fraud and scientific espionage. In the brief preface, a woman describes an encounter with her former boyfriend Nicholas, who she thought was dead. Physically the man claiming to be Nicholas Slopen does not resemble the man she was involved with 20 years earlier, but his memories of their time together are complete and persuasive. The remainder of the novel is made up of a manuscript she finds on a flash drive, left behind after Slopen’s sudden death. Incarcerated in a mental institution, Slopen narrates a story that begins innocently enough, with a wealthy music producer and collector of literary artefacts named Hunter Gould seeking his advice regarding the authenticity of newly discovered letters supposedly written by Samuel Johnson, letters that Gould is considering purchasing. Slopen’s investigation into the Johnson letters brings him into contact with a group of mysterious characters from the former Soviet Union and a situation that, as gradually becomes clear, is not at all what it first appears to be. As the improbable events pile up, Slopen comes to realize that everyone involved is hiding something, and the mystery only deepens once Slopen learns where the letters originated. From there he is sucked into a churning vortex of deception, trickery and scientific hubris that places him and those he loves in mortal danger. To give away more of the plot would be a disservice to an enormously engaging and intelligent novel that delivers twists and bombshells aplenty and an author of great imaginative gifts. Let it be said that in Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux speculates how the experience of being human would be altered if our lives were not necessarily tethered to the mortal carcass in which we were born. His dramatic exploration of this question is provocative and entertaining.
    • 5/5
      Since reading FAR NORTH by Marcel Theroux five years ago, I know to expect a certain depth of concept, thought and feeling from his novels. Theroux’ latest publication, STRANGE BODIES, takes these to the nth degree. The concept: the transmigration of consciousness from one host to another via resurrected Nazi experiments; the thought: how do we define consciousness and are our bodies slaves to it; the feeling: victimization by those more powerful, richer than us to prolong their lives by stealing ours. In 376 pages!STRANGE BODIES reads at times gothic horror story, philosophical wondering, literary fiction, mystery novel and science fiction. It is rich, laden with questions and unexpected points of view that had me talking back to the book! Let me admit that I’m not good at discerning the “unreliable narrator” device so I don’t know if we are supposed to believe everything the main character says. It would be a good discussion point for a book club.British Dr. Nicholas Slopen, unhappy at home and at work (he’s a university prof) is contacted by an American music magnate to verify the authenticity of previously unknown letters of Dr. Samuel Johnson (author of The Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755) that have come into his possession. Slopen sure could use the money and he takes the job for a good fee. Theroux describes Slopen’s disbelief then thrill at the possible genuineness of the letters with an infectious intensity that made me want to read Johnson. The linguistics are all in order but the paper and ink are modern. Curiouser and curiouser. Slopen inveigles a meeting with the author of what must be brilliant forgeries: a supposedly Russian man, ill and confused, who is kept drugged in a room in his “sister’s” house. More surreptitious meetings reveal that this man is not Russian but English, and he is adamant that he is Dr. Samuel Johnson. The scenes between Slopen and Dr. Johnson are touchingly real and lead me to believe that Theroux is a Johnson scholar in his own right.In befriending “Dr. Johnson”, Slopes uncovers the truth of an unholy alliance between Russian mobsters and the music millionaire. Suddenly, his own life is in danger. The unravelling of Slopes’ upper middle class lifestyle and career as he becomes prey to the Faustian plot showcases Theroux’ formidable storytelling powers. I would say that STRANGE BODIES has something to say to most readers. It’s the only book in my recent reading history where I would pause after a certain passage, wishing I had a another reader to discuss it with. STRANGE BODIES is a brilliant, confusing, intriguing story that sticks with you long after you’ve closed the book.Highly recommended to all.
    • 3/5
      Theroux’s 2009 novel Far North was shortlisted for the Clarke Award, so I read it… and I wasn’t much impressed. So I’m not sure what possessed me to give Strange Bodies a go – yes, people recommended it, and the premise sounded interesting, but… Anyway, I’m glad I did. If the plot doesn’t quite match the striking opening, the journey to the end is at least a damn sight better than you’d get from a typical genre novel. A man who apparently died a couple of years before, and in fact in no way resembles the dead man, contacts an old friend, who is persuaded of his claimed identity. Later she finds a thumb drive, containing the document which forms the bulk of the novel – which proves to be the history of a man, a Samuel Johnson scholar, who was asked by a media mogul to authenticate some letters and finds himself caught up in a secret Soviet experiment based on the Common Task (I’ve read up on Fedorov for a WIP, so I knew exactly what this referred to). The scientific scaffolding for the central premise was a little hard to swallow, but all the stuff wrapped around it was very good indeed. I thought the Johnson scholarship very clever, and the way Theroux handled the premise good. Despite my feelings about Far North, I am, much like several other people, surprised this never made any award shortlists.
    • 4/5
      A literary thriller inspired by Frankenstein, cognitive science and metaphysics. The portrayal of a re-embodied Samuel Johnson, seen through the eyes of the protagonist (who, himself, experiences re-embodiment later in the novel) exudes authenticity. The book unrelentingly plumbs the philosophical depths of selfhood. David SahnerSanta Cruz, CA
    • 4/5
      The Theroux family has an impressive literary heritage. I first encountered Paul Theroux, an American travel writer and novelist, through reading his popular and mesmerizing travel narrative The Great Railway Bazaar. I also enjoyed his novel, The Mosquito Coast, that won the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Then there is his brother, Alexander, who is a writer and artist whose Darconville's Cat: A Novel is a Rabelaisian epic both in its words and multiple styles. But there is a new generation of literary members of this family that includes Marcel Theroux, Paul's son.It is Marcel's most recent novel that I found on the library shelves recently. It is a labyrinthine exploration of identity and mortality, filled with big ideas. That would have carried many for many more than the less than three hundred pages of this unique story. It qualifies as what I, adopting the approach of Margaret Atwood, would call speculative fiction; others might go further and call it science fiction. Either way it is a neat combination of literary criticism (the protagonist is a Samuel Johnson scholar, or perhaps he was); a conspiracy about the science of consciousness involving new bodies (sort of neo-Frankenstein); and a love angle or two that may involve some necrotic foreplay.Dr. Nicholas Slopen—the literary scholar and Johnson expert—has already been declared dead at least once, before the novel presents itself as the testimony found by a former lover on a flash memory stick. The document begins in a mental ward, where the patient is trying to convince his therapists that he is in fact Slopen, whose death has been well-documented. He then relates the tale of how he (Slopen) had been hired to document some newly discovered Johnson letters that he immediately dismissed as fake, before realizing that he was in the midst of something far more extraordinary and sinister. Vera, a woman Nicholas makes friends with after a mysterious Silicon Valley type has hired him to authenticate some unearthed writings by Johnson, wears corrective shoes and acts as a kind of menial for more elite bosses. When Nicholas's examination of the unearthed documents turns up some oddities, he finds himself in communication with the novel's most interesting character, Jack—an initially nonverbal savant who was convinced that he was in fact Johnson and who eventually convinces the scholar that something stranger is afoot than fraud or even madness. “I felt I understood less and less, even as, intuitively, I was drawing closer to the hidden chamber of the infinitely dark truth.”And within that infinitely dark truth, distinctions between sanity and madness, life and death are not nearly as absolute as they might have initially appeared: “All madness has a touch of death to it....But the finer details of reality—the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature—have something delicate and consensual about them....Each time someone drops out of our collective reality, it weakens a little.” The author interpolates comments from the observers of the supposed Nicholas Slopen and the plot gradually becomes one of strange bodies and stranger activities. The exact way in which the titular strange bodies begin to manifest themselves in the tale at this point makes reading this novel worth your while.This fictional narrative could be compared to Philip K. Dick or perhaps Borges, but whether it reminds you of them or others you may have read it is unique in the style and marvelous tightness of Theroux's structure, which launches the final part of the story with more than one delicious twist. Twists aside, though, this is a thoughtful book that interrogates the intersection of literature and the self. Why are we drawn to certain works? To what extent are we defined by our literatures? Can books and ideas grant us a kind of immortality? Can great authors really shape our lives or our world? There is also a theme that seems to ask to what extent we can control books and authors—how much of them are "ours" (the rightful property of the public domain) and how much of them should be? These questions keep you wondering—and ensure that Theroux's strange little world will work its way under your skin. Theroux, like his father and uncle, is a master prose-smith; he builds a great, brooding atmosphere of slow-burning dread, splicing bits of Milton into conversations in which characters have "the haunted and knowing eyes of a caged ape" (p. 71). As Nicholas's ordinary life begins to disintegrate, the self-pitying tone in which he narrates the beginning of the novel takes on new meaning and leaves us ultimately moved by his plight.Often enthralling and occasionally maddening, the novel expands the reader’s sense of possibility even as it strains credulity.
    • 5/5
      Unlike anything I've read before.... a complex, twisting story that envelops reader and brings them to the question of what makes us, us.