In the Land of the Living e-bog

';Part vaudeville and part tragic opera, it dances and rages with uncommon wisdom, conveying the pain, comedy, and beauty of familial love.'John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Red Daughter The Auberons are a lovably neurotic, infernally intelligent family who love and hate each otherand themselvesin equal measure. Despite a difficult upbringing, patriarch Isadore almost attains the life of his dreams through education, marriage, and fatherhood. He has talent, but he also has rageand happiness is not meant to be his for very long. Isidore's sons, Leo and Mack, haunted by the mythic, epic proportions of their father's heroics and the tragic events that marked their early lives, have alternately relied upon and disappointed one another since the day Mack was born. Just when Leo reaches a crossroads between potential self-destruction and new freedom, Mack invites him on a road trip from Los Angeles to Cleveland. As the brothers make their way east, and towards understanding, their battles and reconciliations illuminate the power of family to both destroy and empowerand the price and rewards of independence. ';Ratner casts Isadore's struggle in mythic terms, mixing Isaac Babel with Chaucerian adventure, as he makes his way into the gentrified world of American success.'San Francisco Chronicle ';Part rumination, part fairy tale, and part road narrative, Ratner's book paints a picture of the terrible weight of history, self-created or otherwise, that presses down on future generations.'Booklist ';Compellingly written . . . brilliant . . . richly wrought . . . creatively bears the imprint of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home, and Phillip Roth's Indignation . . . a well-crafted novel.'Haaretz