Excerpt from Wagner at Midnight by Katherine Guckenberger
09/06/08 01:44
This breathtakingly brilliant novel follows the
multi-generational fortunes, and misfortunes, of a
German-American family in the Ohio River Valley.
The narrator, Bear Schlumber, is the son of a
proud mattress-store owning patriarch whose family
has far more skeletons than closet space. Even
a cursory list of their pathologies is cringe-making,
from Bear's long-term affair with his mother-in-law,
which even her Alzheimer's and confinement to a
nursing home has barely cooled; to his aunt's
suicide; to sexual abuse; to murder. And yet to
label the Schlumber family strictly in terms of its
moral squalor is to negate it.
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