I Am Radar

Starred review from December 15, 2014
The gripping story of Radar Radmanovic, born in Elizabeth, N.J., in 1975, begins with his coal-black skin—which came as a total surprise to his white
parents. The troubled couple take young Radar to northern Norway for an experimental electric-shock procedure that will alter his skin color. There, they meet a tight-knit group of secretive physicists/puppeteers who call themselves Kirkenesferda. They stage elaborate avant-garde puppet performances in the middle of war zones and recruit Radar’s father—an expert radio and TV engineer. With masterly prose, Larsen (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet) tells the tragic history of how the puppeteers managed to create art while others around them suffered and died, everywhere from New Jersey to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The novel takes a Borgesian turn near the end, when Radar finds himself in Africa, helping Kirkenesferda produce its most ambitious performance yet. Larsen’s many vivid imaginings include a spellbinding narrative of a family torn apart by the Bosnian war (complete with photos and drawings), the history of a Cambodian rubber plantation, and a treacherous journey across the Atlantic in a container ship. This is a sprawling, engrossing novel about the ravages of war and the triumph of art. Larsen is an effortless magician, and his performance here is a pure delight. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency.

December 15, 2014
Strange things happen when Radar Radmanovic is around. For that matter, in Larsen's (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, 2009) peripatetic sophomore novel, strange things bring Radar around in the first place-and thereon hangs a tale. Radar-"You know, radar. Like bats. And aeroplanes," says his father by way of explanation-is notably dark-skinned, though his parents are pale and even pasty. Says the attending doctor, "This will correct itself." It does not, and Radar, the author of many quests, is left to puzzle out a cure, if a cure is in fact wanted, as certainly his mother believes is the case. The search for an answer, until one finally dawns on mom, leads him into the company of a strange congeries of supposed doctors who are really something on the order of performance artists; warns a well-meaning but ineffectual telegram, "They have no idea what they are doing." What they're doing is traveling around performing oddball theatrical pieces in war zones such as Pol Pot's Cambodia and the Bosnia of the early 1990s, but there's a deeper purpose to their wanderings, and in that respect, they seem to have a pretty good idea of what they're up to after all, even if it might not make immediate sense to the reader. Larsen's tale enters into arcane realms indeed, all talk of rolling blackouts, melanin in the substantia nigra, Nikola Tesla, sunspots, probability, Schrodinger's cat, and the etiology of epilepsy told in a sequence of loopily connected tales that all somehow wind up back in the marshes of New Jersey. Radar has moments of epiphany ("There was no such thing as Radar's syndrome. There had never been a syndrome. There was only him"). The connections are not always obvious, and some are more successfully forged than others; indeed, some parts are nearly self-contained and are stronger than the whole. And if the ending strains credulity-and a tale about memory that stars a certain Dr. Funes strains patience as well-then it succeeds in bringing those stories under a single roof. If Larsen's story makes demands of its readers, it also offers plenty of rewards. Imaginative, original, nicely surreal-and hyperpigmentarily so.

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February 15, 2015

In 1975 in Elizabeth, NJ, a black child is born to white parents. His mother's obsessive quest to discover the cause of the anomaly brings her into contact with an obscure Norwegian band of scientists/artists who claim they can switch the coloration with a procedure involving electricity. As puppeteers, this reclusive group stages revolutionary "happenings" in war zones around the world, and the novel shifts gears numerous times to provide the backstories of several key members of the group, who come from far-flung nations including Serbia and Cambodia. It isn't clear at first how the various strands will come together, but like the puppeteers' enigmatic "happenings," they make a sort of inexplicable sense in the aggregate. Incorporating real history and literature and a great deal of physics, this second novel from Larsen (after the well-received The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet) contains footnotes and diagrams, many of which derive from genuine sources, making the novel into a kind of historical simulacrum. VERDICT This 656-page postmodern journey across continents and cultures is a delightfully disorienting and immersive experience. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014

In this follow-up to Larsen's audacious debut, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a New York Times best seller short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a black child is inexplicably born to white parents in 1975 suburban New Jersey. His life eventually jumps time and space barriers as he becomes involved with a clandestine group of puppeteers and scientists who perform in war-torn areas: the shattering Balkans, Nazi-occupied Norway, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and more. Reportedly a big bidding war.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2015

In 1975 in Elizabeth, NJ, a black child is born to white parents. His mother's obsessive quest to discover the cause of the anomaly brings her into contact with an obscure Norwegian band of scientists/artists who claim they can switch the coloration with a procedure involving electricity. As puppeteers, this reclusive group stages revolutionary "happenings" in war zones around the world, and the novel shifts gears numerous times to provide the backstories of several key members of the group, who come from far-flung nations including Serbia and Cambodia. It isn't clear at first how the various strands will come together, but like the puppeteers' enigmatic "happenings," they make a sort of inexplicable sense in the aggregate. Incorporating real history and literature and a great deal of physics, this second novel from Larsen (after the well-received The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet) contains footnotes and diagrams, many of which derive from genuine sources, making the novel into a kind of historical simulacrum. VERDICT This 656-page postmodern journey across continents and cultures is a delightfully disorienting and immersive experience. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.