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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
Claudia Casper is out for big game in her second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, which is nothing less than an anatomization of the interconnections between love, war, biology, gender, sex, politics, feminism, misogyny, terrorism, democracy, capitalism, communism, and fascism. There is a story dropped among all of those abstract nouns: a tale of a particularly uneasy father-daughter relationship. Alfred Lion, the masculinist pole of the book, is a German expatriate who endures the Second World War as a young boy, then flees the country for a rootless existence as a man of the world. Carmen, his first daughter, is born in Canada in the '50s and is soon all but abandoned by Alfred in his perpetual lust for other countries and other women. While Carmen grows up to be a zoologist and mother, Alfred philanders his way through an uncountable number of women (and wives), eventually taking a post as a mining executive in the troubled Argentina of the late '70s. Carmen visits him frequently during those years and is left in a state of unresolved guilt by what she learns about the government's anti-subversive activities, which her father vehemently condones. Most of The Continuation of Love by Other Means is devoted to Carmen and Alfred's unspoken ruminations on the issues listed above. There is nothing particularly academic about Casper's treatment of these matters, but her book will appeal most to readers who are interested in a rambling study of sexuality and who don't mind torrents of sentiment or enormous and transparent symbolism. --Jack Illingworth