Product Description

Paul Stevens enters a world of anxious curiosity as he struggles to know more about his new love, Judith, after discovering that his gambling brother, Henry, knows her through a mutual connection in her secret past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3458965 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 242 pages

Amazon.com Review
From Matt Cohen, the author of Emotional Arithmetic, comes this account of two brothers. At once opposites--Paul is a bookseller with a passion for Charles Dickens, while Henry's interests run towards cars and racing--and inextricably bound by the ties of blood, the two brothers replay a story rooted in the tale of Cain and Abel. The story unfolds in a Toronto that most visitors never see--a seamy underbelly of pool halls and gas stations peopled with heroin addicts and cops gone bad.

From Publishers Weekly
Contemporary notions of love, family and community evolve through this insightful bildungsroman set principally in a decadent Toronto of the 1970s. Narrator Paul Stevens has always been somewhat marginalized by the strong, reckless presence of his star-crossed older brother, Henry. An affair with Martha, an older married woman, brings new influences into Paul's life, including the writings of Dickens and Flaubert. When Paul leaves Henry's auto shop to sell used books for a local dealer, he doesn't realize that the dealer, Fenwick, is Martha's husband. But this is only the first of many tangled connections that will form a new urban family for Paul, whose father is dead and whose mother has her own new life. When mysterious young Judith, a drug addict, comes to work at the bookstore, she and Paul seem immediately destined for each other. Their trysts in the honeymoon suite of a seedy hotel change Paul's life further?only to lead it around again to Henry, his original and perhaps insoluble problem. Cohen (Emotional Arithmetic) brings these complex relationships to life in the thoughtful, slightly elegiac voice of Paul, who recalls the story as a middle-aged man. At times, Paul's hindsight, intruding for a single thought or paragraph, is disorienting. But Cohen's investigation of unlikely, yet inevitable, human interdependence is wise and sensitive.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Paul Stevens is a small boy when his mother leaves. Paul is raised by his father, a jeweler, and Henry, his much admired older brother. Henry teaches him to fight and introduces him to Toronto's pool halls, but Paul is more drawn to the world of books. After their father dies, Paul works for a while in Henry's garage but soon chances upon a job at Fenwick's Used and Antiquarian Bookstore, patronized by people on the margins of the literary world. There, Paul meets and falls in love with Judith; their passionate affair is conducted mostly in the honeymoon suite of the seedy Savoy Hotel. This brooding, atmospheric coming-of-age novel effectively portrays the loss of innocence and idealism. Mary Ellen Quinn

Customer Reviews

Canadian Angst
Passion may the strongest motivating force in human nature. Not to be confused with compulsion or addiction, passion can overwhelm rational thought. THE BOOKSELLER explores this frailty in the coming-of-age tale of Paul Stevens escaping the domination by an older brother only to succumb to a consuming passion for his co-worker Judith. Paul loses all common sense in the relationship, indulging in Judith's vices of alcoholism and drugs. Concurrently, the brother Henry travels in bad company incurring unpayable, life threatening debt. Henry deftly puts the onus of survival on Paul, the life-long "patsy" for Henry's ambitions and indiscretions. Passion can die. And Paul's does. But a catharsis of bitter confrontations and the dealth of Henry must take place before Paul can achieve a life of independence. THE BOOKSELLER is a chronicle of expectations met with disappointments. It may be true to life. It certainly is not inspirational

Pull yourself together, please
Paul is the type of person that, for me at least, spends all the compassion and sympathy that I have for him in his situation as he plods on and on making the same mistakes. Please Paul get on with your life. He is not even a bookseller but, at best , a reluctant clerk. The writing is uneven. Some of it is quite solid but then there are many bumps along the way. I bought the book in Canada in an effort to discover a new writer. He, by all measures of publicity, was a slam dunk. I think I will move on. Everyone is entitled to one mistake but you can read the talent there.

A novel riddled with inept wastes of skin
Okay, I FINALLY FINALLY finished this book. Not a bad book in all - well written with Cohen's usual flair, but just not zingy enough. It sort of meandered along with the main character, Paul - a gimp of a protagonist with a noodle for a spine. I just hated him. In love with a junkie named Judith (oh please hand me a tissue) who in turn deceives him and treats him like the doormat he subconsciously wants to be. Now, that's all fine and fair.

But how sentimental and repitive can a book get?? This one, after reading two good ones by Cohen, was about as refreshing as a sewer breeze or one of those massive subway farts that happen in big and overly-populated cities. The go-nowhere plot had me more interested in my cuticles and screwing metal splinters into my eye sockets than in where these repugnant dolts would wind up by the end of the story. A quarter of the way through I just wanted Judith to overdose on self-pity and for Paul to get beamed up by a sadistic anal-probe spacecraft from the planet Buttron. As much as I try to support Canadian writers in general, and especially a good writer like Cohen, I cannot in good conscience ever recommend this book. Dull dull DULL dull DULL DULL DULL.

Two stars for (A) lyrical writing and (B) 'cause Cohen is Canadian, eh.