- Paperback: 373 pages
- Publisher: Thomson Learning; 1st Harvest Ed edition (10 Jun 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0156000474
- ISBN-13: 978-0156000475
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.5 x 3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,744,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Ekaterina
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
"Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all..." So begins our friendly narrator, who happens to be dead. Ekaterina has just arrived in an unnamed city at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela with a pasteboard suitcase, a kerchief that covers her lack of hair, and little more than a rudimentary knowledge of English, the language in which she will eventually write Georgie Boy and her other phenomenal best-sellers. Ekaterina is guided throughout her adventures not only by the ghost-narrator - who has mysterious motives of his own for meddling with her personal Fate Goddess - but also by an "author" determined to bring her, in time, to his homeland, the Bodark Mountains. At every turn, Ekaterina's rise to fortune is rattled by her consuming appetite for pubescent boys. Her novel Georgie Boy earns her wealth enough to take over the top floor of an aging resort hotel in the Bodarks, as her idol, Nabokov, had taken over a suite in a Swiss resort hotel after the success of Lolita. Indeed Ekaterina's story becomes, in ways planned and unplanned, something of a wicked inversion of Nabokov's wicked novel...with many twists of its own. Ekaterina is a masterwork of illusion and allusion, and like all of Donald Harington's novels it affords delight from beginning to end.
About the Author
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by story-tellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas. His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).
--This text refers to an alternate
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EKATERINA YOU WERE, and you were not at all. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
EKATERINA YOU WERE, and you were not at all. Read the first page
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9 reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A fabulous book
2 July 2001
Format:Paperback
I only came across this book after reading Nabakov's 'Lolita'. And I have to say that if any of you are contemplating reading 'Ekaterina' you'd be rewarded if you read 'Lolita' first (preferably the 'Annotated Lolita' edited by Alfred Appel Jr).
One similarity between 'Lolita' and 'Ekaterina' is obvious - the disturbing theme of pedophilia. But there are so many other parallels. One in particular is the examination of authorial intrusion. In 'Lolita', Nabakov allows himself surreptitious peeps and circumlocutions as if from behind the stage of a puppet theater. And to the intelligent reader he lets it be known that he is the puppet master and that his novel is not a slice of "reality" but a work of fiction.
Similarly (but, it must be said, less subtly) Harington's manipulation of his characters implies an authorial presence at all times. Harington examines the roll of the artist as God right from the start by using the second person narrative technique. This is a technique that I have rarely come across but Harington uses it expertly.
For those of you who like reading complex novels filled with self-reflexion, intertextuality, and jokes aimed at publishers then this is a novel for you!
Highly recommended.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Wonderful evocation of an immigrant in a rural tourist town
10 Aug 2000
Format:Hardcover
Donald Harington remains the best uncelebrated author in America. "Ekaterina," set in a thinly disguised Eureka Springs, Arkansas, at a majestic old hotel (with a creepy history), is story telling at its best. The details are perfect; if you've read any of Harington's previous novels, you are richly rewarded. If you haven't, you are not harmed in the telling of the story but you will want to read the others when you've finished. This will be a book you not only enjoy but you will want to turn others onto. I once collected an autograph from a favorite famous author, William Styron, who told me, in our too-brief conversation, that Harington is one of his favorite authors. Read "Ekaterina" and you will see why.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
rich in entertainment
28 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback
You may object to the subject matter (a young woman who lusts after 12 year-old boys), but this was a very satisfying, very complete novel. It is rich in content, varied in plot and environment, and even though some of the events are pretty implausible, they are tackled with such grace and command that you willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. I highly recommend this absorbing novel, with a most surprising ending. Donald Harington, RIP, tremendous author. Check out The Cherry Pit as well.
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