I Am Radar: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
The Washington Post
"[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon’s V. to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That’s the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance."
The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy—with pitch-black skin—born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”
A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole.
Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar—now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands—who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend.
As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen’s I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity’s darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer
"Larsen’s is an extraordinarily lush and verdant imagination, blooming wildly on the borders of the absurd and the riotous, the surreal and the ordinary…Quite unlike any [novel] I’ve read in a long time. One doesn’t consume it; one enters it, as part of a literary enactment… Brilliant…The effort is well-rewarded: It is both maddening and marvelous…I can’t wait to see what he pulls off next."
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Reif Larsen. (2015). I Am Radar: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Reif Larsen. 2015. I Am Radar: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Reif Larsen, I Am Radar: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Reif Larsen. I Am Radar: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2015.
| Library | Owned | Available |
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The Washington Post
"[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon’s V. to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That’s the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance."
The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy—with pitch-black skin—born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”
A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole.
Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar—now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands—who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend.
As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen’s I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity’s darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption.Cleveland Plain-Dealer
"Larsen’s is an extraordinarily lush and verdant imagination, blooming wildly on the borders of the absurd and the riotous, the surreal and the ordinary…Quite unlike any [novel] I’ve read in a long time. One doesn’t consume it; one enters it, as part of a literary enactment… Brilliant…The effort is well-rewarded: It is both maddening and marvelous…I can’t wait to see what he pulls off next."- reviews
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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.
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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.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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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.
- premium: True
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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.
- premium: True
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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.
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The Washington Post
"[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon’s V. to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That’s the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance."
The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy—with pitch-black skin—born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”
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