Peru (American Literature Series) - Softcover

Peru is an achievement, one that is profoundly American and yet representative of profound and widespread nostalgias. Here is emergent Lish, with a voice like no other. --Harold Bloom

Peru is simply the name Lish gives to the endlessly prolonged moment during which we human beings keep on staggering around, bleeding from the wounds we inflict on each other, understanding nothing of what is happening to us, thinking only of how to deliver the next blow.

In Peru, our fascination springs from the terror of compulsive memory and from the novelist s struggle to turn it into art. It is a struggle that Gordon Lish wins brilliantly. --Don DeLillo

"Peru is an achievement, one that is profoundly American and yet representative of profound and widespread nostalgias. Here is emergent Lish, with a voice like no other." --Harold Bloom

"In Peru, our fascination springs from the terror of compulsive memory and from the novelist's struggle to turn it into art. It is a struggle that Gordon Lish wins brilliantly." --Don DeLillo

"Peru is simply the name Lish gives to the endlessly prolonged moment during which we human beings keep on staggering around, bleeding from the wounds we inflict on each other, understanding nothing of what is happening to us, thinking only of how to deliver the next blow."

Arguably Gordon Lish’s masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, “There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it.” Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret—real or imagined—unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn’t). Peru’s narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that spawned a killing: the sense of tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh. Ambiguous, complex, inventive, and subversively comic, Peru is a compendium of unnerving observations about memory, violence, obsession, and the potential horror behind the facade of an ordinary life.