"Jonathan Lethem has succeeded in delivering a wonderland on this side of the looking glass." -"San Francisco Bay Guardian" Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has left her boyfriend for nothing...nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice's spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of "Gun, with Occasional Music." Alice ...
Read More
"Jonathan Lethem has succeeded in delivering a wonderland on this side of the looking glass." -"San Francisco Bay Guardian" Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has left her boyfriend for nothing...nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice's spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of "Gun, with Occasional Music." Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste-tastes: it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws-because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.
Read Less
Add this copy of As She Climbed Across the Table Audio Cds to cart. $19.99, good condition, Sold by The Yard Sale Store rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Narrowsburg, NY, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Books on Tape.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. 5 Reliable AUDIO CDs, polished for your satisfaction, withdrawn from the library in the clamshell case. Library sticker and marking to the box and the CDs. Some shelf wear and edge wear to the box. The AUDIO CDs are in individual slots, protected and clear sounding. Enjoy this unabridged AUDIO CD performance!
As She Climbed Across the Table is about the strained relationship between a physicist, named Alice, and her boyfriend. When the physics department creates a void, a lack, an area of nothingness, the science community is set ablaze. Alice is drawn to the void, and begins spending her days and nights with it- with "him" as she says. She becomes obsessed, devoting her life to what they have named simply Lack, and the book is the story of her boyfriend, Phillip's, attempt to rescue her from oblivion. Many have said that As She Climbed Across the Table is Jonathan Lethem's weakest book. As for me, this is the first of his I've read. I really enjoyed it. It's a fun book about a silly, incomprehensible occurance (namely, Lack), but there is more if you look for it. Lethem's descriptions are beautiful, and although the reader sympathizes with neither Alice nor her boyfriend, likeable characters can be found in the secondary list. In all, I thought it a good book about what love really is, and what people really are. As Phillip continues to struggle for Alice's love, he considers whether love is really something he should need to fight for.
