“The real protagonists of the Quartet are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is profoundly in love with these, and it’s… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“This heady mixture of the philosophical and the dramatic runs throughout the book, the one underlying the other, and the result, unlikely though it may be, is a seamless unity rather than an awkward tugging of opposites. Life is talk, after all, lots of it—crude, bawdy, serious, occasionally transcendent—and that’s what Whittemore gives us. It’s also a world of action… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share
“Like many authors belonging to that large and unfortunate caste, “the unjustly neglected”, Whittemore suffers from being an embarrassingly good read. He also suffers from a bigger crime, in that he is almost impossible to pigeonhole. Reviewers’ comparisons bounce from Pynchon to Nabokov, Greene to Calvino and Fuentes to Vonnegut, only to hastily assert that he is, of course, very… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share
“Once again, Whittemore escapes what might be a fatal mistake in another author. Far from the funhouse hall of mirrors one might expect from such endless fracturing, the compulsive replication of this same idea only intensifies the book, turning it into a single mirror and magnifying the image. What is the true nature of man? How close can one ever… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share
“No, no guns, they won’t get us anywhere. I tried that when I was young and it’s a useless interim game. Use guns and… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“What this amounts to, and what makes the critic with his nose for genre and structure so nervous, is that by all accounts this shouldn’t be a good book at all, should in fact be a really terrible book, and the Quartet a rambling, self-indulgent mess. It’s too clogged up with words to be straight forward action adventure, it’s too… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share
“Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway. Stern’s words, he suddenly… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“The conversation can be serious, too, taking on the form of a grave philosophical discourse as the characters take turns to expound their views… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“The distant rumble of gun fire and armored vehicles is the rumble of history itself, bearing down on Whittemore’s characters as they engage in… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“… so it isn’t true any longer that we can just create ourselves. Now we must. Our childhood as a race is over and… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“Yes. Despite the ultimate mystery of the universe there’s still one small truth we can live by. Choice. Never merely to take what we… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
“… a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into… — Edward Whittemore Copy Share Image
