The Apartment: A Novel [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GO6I5N8 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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A powerful and elegant debut audiobook about love, memory, exile, and war.
One snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search for an apartment to rent.
The Apartment follows the couple across a blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future - their cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to cure violence with violence.
An audiobook about how our relationships to others - and most importantly to ourselves - alters how we see the world, The Apartment perfectly captures the peculiarity and excitement of being a stranger in a strange city. Written in an affecting and intimate tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama, Greg Baxter's clear-eyed first audiobook tells the intriguing story of these two people on this single day. Both beguiling and raw in its observations and language, The Apartment is a crisp audiobook with enormous range that offers profound and unexpected wisdom.
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- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 5 hours and 25 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 3, 2013
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GO6I5N8
I'd rate this 4.5 stars.
Greg Baxter's debut novel, The Apartment, is a terrifically written, somewhat meandering book that both is and is not about what you think it is.
In an unnamed European city (although some reviewers have guessed this is Prague, Baxter said the novel's setting is an amalgamation of several different cities), an unnamed American narrator is planning to meet his friend, Saskia, to find him an apartment, as he had been living austerely in a formerly elegant hotel since he arrived. The narrator is in his early 40s, a former Navy sailor who had served on a submarine in Iraq and then returned to that country as a defense contractor. But he doesn't like to talk about the past, because of the things he did while he was in Iraq.
"I could fill the silence by talking about the past, but I try not to think about the past. For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret that was contemporaneous with experience, and which sometimes preceded experience. Whenever I think of my past now I see a great black wave that has risen a thousand stories high and is suspended above above me, as though I am a city by the sea, and I hold the wave in suspension through a perspective that is as constrained as a streak of clear glass in a fogged-up window."
The novel takes place over a one-day period, although the narrator finds himself reminiscing on a number of encounters he has had with people throughout his life, both after arriving in this city and in his life before coming to the city. It is around Christmastime, and winter has the city in its thrall. Snow falls throughout the day.
The narrator and Saskia travel throughout the city, on foot as well as by train, bus, streetcar, and taxi.
This slim novel takes place over the course of a very cold, snowy day in what vaguely feels like an old, Eastern European city. Our narrator is in search of an apartment in this city and he spends the day with Saskia, a young woman who is helping him find a place, as he doesn’t know the language or the layout.
Like many novels of this type, the “present day” action is minimal. Saskia comes to the hotel to pick-up the narrator. They travel the wintery streets, meeting a few of Saskia’s friends and having a few slight encounters. They look at an apartment which the narrator quickly takes. He moves in with his handful of possessions. They go meet a group of Saskia’s friends at a local hangout and stay until the wee hours, when they then leave, pointing their way towards breakfast and home. The end.
The interest of this story comes almost entirely from our position inside the mind of our narrator and what we learn of him as the story progresses. We get glimpses into his past—his roots in a small American desert town, his military service, his return to Iraq as an independent contractor, his brief turn as a wealthy American at home, his memories of a high school friend who died, his first months in his new city. We also get his impressions of Saskia, her friends, and his new surroundings.
Our impressions end up being somewhat unclear, the picture clouded much like the blowing snow softens the edges of the city through which these characters travel. And yet, it feels true, since our narrator is clearly adrift and has not come to terms with his life.
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