Generation Loss
by Elizabeth Hand
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth HandEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-14
ISBN: 0156031345
Number of pages: 300
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Generation Loss
Book Review: (4.5 stars) "You and me, we carry the dead on our backs."
Summary: 4 Stars
Damaged goods. Punk music scene photographer Cass "Scary" Neary achieves a sort of aberrant notoriety with her book "Dead Girls". Drawn to the nihilistic mentality of the 70s punk movement, the drug-fueled Cass revels in anti-materialistic rebellion, careless of her body, pushing to the edge and over, increasingly drawn to the pure, if dark, images of subjects no longer animated by a life force. Enamored of the bridge between here and gone, Cass lurks with her camera in shadowy corners, filthy alleys, recording the last moments of wasted lives. Her second book barely acknowledged, Cass remains inspired by those photographers who capture the stark underbelly of the real world. Thirty years later, Neary is as disconnected as ever, living frugally, seeking respite in drugs and alcohol. When she is offered a gig interviewing her idol, the iconic photographer Aphrodite Kamestos, who lives on a secluded island off the coast of Maine, a more-seasoned Cass is drawn one more time into an adventure that is as treacherous as it is seductive.
Danger is familiar to a woman who still bears the scars of a traumatic encounter in a vacant lot ("It's always 4 a.m. beneath a broken street lamp."), her instinctively ignoring warning signs to pay homage to a long love affair with the eye of the camera, the infinite beauty of genius. Such is the early work of Aphrodite, removed from the prying eyes of hangers-on and acolytes. To be in the presence of such talent is its own reward, regardless of Aphrodite's reaction to any intrusion. From the familiar squalor of her digs in New York City, Cass plunges into the heart-stopping chill of Maine, ill-prepared but determined to garner some nugget, proof that her long search for perfection is not in vain. Genius is like fool's gold, irresistible. Accidentally meeting Aphrodite's son the night before her choppy passage to Paswegas Island, Cass is jarred by a vague intuition of danger, distracted as well by a profusion of posters of the lost, tattered notices, "Have you seen this person"? A world-weary survivor, Cass's instincts are self-serving, cynical, a driven woman whose hopefulness is buried under years of disaffection and regret, her imagined and drug-addled responses routinely confrontational.
Her passage into unfamiliar territory sprinkled with epithets, Hand's protagonist challenges us to see beyond the façade, to care about Cass in spite of her behavior, blazing through the eccentric lives of island residents, sniffing out dishonesty, danger and genius in equal measure. Island dramas tragically play out, Cass the unlikely catalyst who is more in sync with her surroundings than she will admit. In an adrenaline-shot climax, Cass meets genius and evil face to face, haunted by the hypnotic images that call to her artist's soul. A provocative and unpredictable character, Cass is compelling in her abandon, her struggle to reclaim sanity in the face of annihilation, a prickly, surprising heroine. Hand captures that most elusive of subjects, the artist's quest for the perfect, redemptive image and the chaos that attends such vision. Never ethereal or pure, this is murky territory, strewn with despair and failure, as heady as the first injection of heroin into a throbbing vein, a reckless impulse to discover the Holy Grail or know the searing touch of the hand of God. Luan Gaines/ 2008.
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