- Paperback: 528 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (4 Aug 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0224075977
- ISBN-13: 978-0224075978
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.6 x 4.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,242,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Trance
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More About the Author
Product Description
Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days
TRANCE is a work of startling insight, marvelously and masterfully evoking the grim stuff of true American nightmares
Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land
...scathing, gripping and profound, this book is a meditation and a provocation...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Trance is a vividly imagined, brilliantly written, darkly intelligent, and devastatingly satirical examination of the dissipation of 60's values and the commencement of the Me-First era of the 70's that carries forward until the present day. An epic book, Trance carries very little fat on its frame. Each sentence is packed with an unforgettably vivid image, each page shimmers with revelation. The numerous characters are explored with depth, complexity, and occasionally surprising empathy.
Despite its length, Trance is a page-turner, too, with edge-of-the-seat scenes of suspense and the compelling detail of a police procedural. And yet this is a highly adventurous work of art as well, with its surprises (shifts in tense and point of view, highly cinematic renderings of certain scenes, entertainingly digressive set-pieces, intertextual and popcultural references, subtle typographic play) integrated into the text so expertly one hardly notices the "experimental."
At the end, the reader realizes that the story of "Patty Hearst" (Alice Galton, in this version) is a mere pretext on which Sorrentino drapes this narrative coat of many colors, a device through which he depicts and satirizes the seismic disturbances upsetting American culture during the 70's, the bankruptcy of cheap revolutionary rhetoric, the meaning and depth of identity itself.
Trance is a masterpiece, powerful and exuberant and beautiful.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Trance' is a great American novel, Sorrentino's second novel focusing on the bizarre story of Patty Hearst and her abduction/induction to the Symbionese Liberation Army. The approach taken towards the subject matter is fresh, taking us from the LA demise of most of the SLA to "Alice's" final days under General Teko prior to capture. It's one of the strangest stories ever, and one that seems pertinent with the DVD reissue of Paul Schrader's eponymous biopic and Robert Stone's excellent documentary 'Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.'
The author apparently hit on the idea for this novel while watching Ms Hearst in a John Waters film - the collision of pop-culture and Patty are key to this book, and relevant when you remind yourself Madonna imitated Patty's SLA terrorist chic on the sloppy 'American Life' album. Or that Neil Young wrote songs on the recently reissued 'On the Beach' that nodded to the SLA (see also Black Box Recorder's 'Kidnapping an Heiress'). 'Trance' captures its era perfectly, anyone interested in the 1970s should enjoy this, and it feels in some ways a companion to Jonathan Lethem's 'The Fortress of Solitude.'
Despite the fact the material seems familiar, Sorrentino makes it seem fresh and is as succesful with the Hearst-SLA history in fictional terms as Don DeLillo was with Oswald-JFK with 'Libra' or Ellroy was with the covert stuff in 'American Tabloid.' Comparisons to something like 'The Executioner's Song' or 'In Cold Blood' seem valid to me. 'Trance' is a great American novel, and as great as Philip Roth's recent 'The Plot Against America', which collided fiction with history.
Format:Paperback
You've heard of minimalist fiction, well now prepare for maximalism in the shape of Trance. It is long, it is digressive and it switches kaleidoscopically from character to character with the aim of evoking the totality of its milieu. America in the mid to late seventies; Vietnam is in the background together with Nixon as a hate figure and the hallucinatory counter-culture in its rawest and most apocalyptical form. This is a mesmerizingly brilliant, funny and yet horrifying book, unlike anything I have ever read before.
In 1973 a group of young people calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army abducted Patty Hearst, daughter of the newspaper heir. In the book Sorrentino has called her Alice Galton, but there is no mistaking who this book is about. Renaming her `Tania' they kept her in a closet for several weeks, tied up, blindfolded and subjected to sexual and verbal assaults. In the weeks to come she took part in a bank raid and issued statements calling her parents "Pigs" and uttering the slogans of her fellow revolutionaries. Then six of the army were trapped in a shoot-out with police, who decided to smoke-bomb and eventually set fire to the building. These six members of the SLA were all killed. The radical left of Berkeley, California, rallied round and with the help of a sports journalist, in the book called Guy Mock (though he has a real-life counterpart), the remains of the SLA, consisting of Tania, "General" Tenko and Yolanda, together with a Japanese American known as Joan, are spirited across America to a new hide-out and everything in the media goes quiet for around 16 months, but the FBI are on their trail.
None of the events are seen primarily from the point of view of Tania, and Sorrentino has said that this is deliberate. He is not interested in romanticising her extraordinary story with details of her affair with Cujo, one of the SLA members with whom she exchanged love tokens, or in politicising her capture with explanations as to how she might be a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome, whereby captives begin to identify with their captors. Sorrentino sees Tania as a subject of the media fiction created out of fact, an icon of the nation - she is someone who is famous for being famous. Yet for all that, at the centre of the book there is a young woman, a cipher, almost, standing in front of a seven-headed serpent, the symbol of the SLA.
Sorrentino's narrative is faithful to the documented truth, yet his narrative delivery is a battleground of competing ideas, a marvellous rehearsal of controversy, cultural perversity and dialectical argument, all based on the fantastical notion of an American revolution in the hands of a group of dissidents against a largely unmoved and unmovably bovine mass. Mining his politically acute and nerveless uber-text is like finding jewels in a river bed. You will nowhere find, however, the human answers to this terrific conundrum, or to the one posed at Patty Hearst's trial. Was she guilty? Of course she was. And then again... But isn't that just, and right? Where are the answers to the philosophical and political mysteries of our time? Isn't it always a matter of who you are and how you live?
This is not what might be called an `easy read', but I found myself hypnotised by the awesome, incantatory, by turns intimate and expansive, shining brilliance of the prose.
In 1973 a group of young people calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army abducted Patty Hearst, daughter of the newspaper heir. In the book Sorrentino has called her Alice Galton, but there is no mistaking who this book is about. Renaming her `Tania' they kept her in a closet for several weeks, tied up, blindfolded and subjected to sexual and verbal assaults. In the weeks to come she took part in a bank raid and issued statements calling her parents "Pigs" and uttering the slogans of her fellow revolutionaries. Then six of the army were trapped in a shoot-out with police, who decided to smoke-bomb and eventually set fire to the building. These six members of the SLA were all killed. The radical left of Berkeley, California, rallied round and with the help of a sports journalist, in the book called Guy Mock (though he has a real-life counterpart), the remains of the SLA, consisting of Tania, "General" Tenko and Yolanda, together with a Japanese American known as Joan, are spirited across America to a new hide-out and everything in the media goes quiet for around 16 months, but the FBI are on their trail.
None of the events are seen primarily from the point of view of Tania, and Sorrentino has said that this is deliberate. He is not interested in romanticising her extraordinary story with details of her affair with Cujo, one of the SLA members with whom she exchanged love tokens, or in politicising her capture with explanations as to how she might be a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome, whereby captives begin to identify with their captors. Sorrentino sees Tania as a subject of the media fiction created out of fact, an icon of the nation - she is someone who is famous for being famous. Yet for all that, at the centre of the book there is a young woman, a cipher, almost, standing in front of a seven-headed serpent, the symbol of the SLA.
Sorrentino's narrative is faithful to the documented truth, yet his narrative delivery is a battleground of competing ideas, a marvellous rehearsal of controversy, cultural perversity and dialectical argument, all based on the fantastical notion of an American revolution in the hands of a group of dissidents against a largely unmoved and unmovably bovine mass. Mining his politically acute and nerveless uber-text is like finding jewels in a river bed. You will nowhere find, however, the human answers to this terrific conundrum, or to the one posed at Patty Hearst's trial. Was she guilty? Of course she was. And then again... But isn't that just, and right? Where are the answers to the philosophical and political mysteries of our time? Isn't it always a matter of who you are and how you live?
This is not what might be called an `easy read', but I found myself hypnotised by the awesome, incantatory, by turns intimate and expansive, shining brilliance of the prose.
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