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The Apartment: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Grand Central Publishing 2013
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Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
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Description
A powerful and elegant debut novel about love, memory, exile, and war.
One snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search for an apartment to rent. The Apartment follows the couple across a blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future-their cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to cure violence with violence.
A novel about how our relationships to others-and most importantly to ourselves-alters how we see the world, The Apartment perfectly captures the peculiarity and excitement of being a stranger in a strange city. Written in an affecting and intimate tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama, Greg Baxter's clear-eyed first novel tells the intriguing story of these two people on this single day. Both beguiling and raw in its observations and language, The Apartment is a crisp novel with enormous range that offers profound and unexpected wisdom.
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More Details
Street Date:
12/03/2013
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781455548477, 9781455547715
ASIN:
B00CO7GGNW
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Greg Baxter. (2013). The Apartment: A Novel. Grand Central Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Greg Baxter. 2013. The Apartment: A Novel. Grand Central Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Greg Baxter, The Apartment: A Novel. Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Greg Baxter. The Apartment: A Novel. Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
Copy Details
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Anne Arundel County Public Library11
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Grouped Work ID:
630d59c3-20fd-3ec4-928d-9efbab6a12e7
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 03, 2017 08:27:51
Date Updated:
Dec 06, 2020 04:27:36
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 06:23:47
Last Metadata Change:
Mar 24, 2024 06:23:47
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 06:23:49
Last Availability Change:
Jun 25, 2023 12:34:39
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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OverDrive Product Record

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A powerful and elegant debut novel about love, memory, exile, and war.
One snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search for an apartment to rent. The Apartment follows the couple across a blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future-their cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to cure violence with violence.
A novel about how our relationships to others-and most importantly to ourselves-alters how we see the world, The Apartment perfectly captures the peculiarity and excitement of being a stranger in a strange city. Written in an affecting and intimate tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama, Greg Baxter's clear-eyed first novel tells the intriguing story of these two people on this single day. Both beguiling and raw in its observations and language, The Apartment is a crisp novel with enormous range that offers profound and unexpected wisdom.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Roddy Doyle
      • content: "Clever, entertaining, brave, it stretches the rules while following a man through one day of his life. I loved it."—Roddy Doyle
      • premium: False
      • source: Hisham Matar, Man Booker Prize finalist for Country of Men
      • content: "Exceptional—a book rich in ideas and poetry."—Hisham Matar, Man Booker Prize finalist for Country of Men
      • premium: False
      • source: Sunday Telegraph
      • content: "Imagine you're on a roller-coaster ... suddenly, without warning, it tips vertiginously, so quickly that your chest constricts and while you're there, suspended, momentarily, at the apex of this roller-coaster, you're aware suddenly of a kind of clarity, a totally new perspective on everything below. Greg Baxter's THE APARTMENT is a bit like this ... Full of unshowy wisdom and surprising moments of beauty.—Sunday Telegraph
      • premium: False
      • source: Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4
      • content: "Stunningly good."—Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        August 12, 2013
        A Navy veteran in his early 40s who has made big money working as a military contractor in Iraq explores an unnamed European city with a possibly romantically inclined local woman, Saskia, in this intriguing debut novel from Baxter, author of the memoir A Preparation for Death. In the course of one day spent searching for an apartment, the anonymous narrator looks back on his role in the American military and his own rather conventional brand of cowardice and hypocrisy: ���I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist... And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel.��� This sensitive, unassuming book is notable for its exploration of the basic disparity between the idea of American power and how it is actually manifested in the world���in this case, through the self-admittedly ���contemptible��� functionary who finds himself seeking an alternate reality in an unfamiliar place, but seems destined to remain ���a citizen of resignation.��� Where the novel shines most is in the telling���the slow, deliberate narrative unfolds like a quiet symphony, and Baxter���s prose lingers inexplicably, like a beautifully sad song. Agent: Lucy Luck, Lucy Luck Associates.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from July 15, 2013
        A formally and thematically ambitious debut novel that aims very high and rarely falls short. In his well-received memoir (A Preparation for Death, 2010), the author writes of his frustrations with a series of previous novels that were never published. Maybe those were learning experiences, for this shows both a mastery of literary technique and a refusal to see such technique as an end in itself, as it engages the world on a number of levels--political, moral, aesthetic (its ruminations on art are where it goes a little over the top), as well as meditations on place, time and memory. Though all these concerns make the novel sound overstuffed, the elliptical concision and narrative momentum keep the prose from ever becoming polemic. Following the lead of James Joyce, Don Delillo and others, the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the life of its protagonist as he makes his way across an unnamed European city in search of the titular apartment. Christmas approaches, but the 41-year-old American seems immune to the holiday spirit and to much in the way of human warmth, as he obliquely recounts the life of dislocation that has brought him to this place that might serve as a final destination but never home. Not that he ever felt at home in his native country--"I was born to hate the place I come from"--and certainly not in his tours of Iraq, in the military and then as a civilian mercenary, selling intelligence for blood money. A woman he has recently met serves as his guide through her city and helps him find the apartment, though the depth of their relationship appears unclear to one or both of them. Not nearly as clear as the view as he stares into the abyss: "I experienced a sensation of falling into nothingness. It seemed not at all like a spontaneous sensation but like a truth that had come a very long way, looking for me, knowing all I would think before I thought it, and shot me out of the sky." A very smart novel that recognizes the limits of intelligence and the distortions of memory.

        COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        July 1, 2013

        In this debut, one of Twelve's two galley giveaways at BookExpo America, an American travels the streets of an unnamed European city with a man helping him hunt for an apartment. The result is a novel that investigates friendship, violence, and the clash of cultures in clean, straightforward language.

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 15, 2013

        An unnamed American recently arrived in an unnamed European city--likely Eastern European by the real Old World feel and the narrator's stay at the Hotel Rus--hunts for an apartment one bitterly cold day with the help of Saskia, a woman he has just met. Along the way, they encounter various friends of hers and are invited to a party. Initially, then, it seems that this intriguing, rather low-key debut will unfold as the painstakingly detailed account of a day in the life of a disaffected man, and that it does. But the story deepens in unexpected ways. While battling slush and stopping with Saskia for a snack, our narrator reflects on his past in dribs and drabs, revealing his former life in the U.S. Navy and then as a highly paid military contractor ("The Army didn't trust you if your fees weren't preposterous"). It's one quick step to more telling reflections on the uses of memory and the pervasiveness of violence, but to Baxter's credit, he doesn't burst forth with a melodramatic moment that wholly explains or changes his character's life. VERDICT Baxter's thoughtful, quietly penetrating book is for those seeking more than a quick read. [See Prepub Alert, 6/10/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 15, 2013
        An unnamed American recently arrived in an unnamed European city--likely Eastern European by the real Old World feel and the narrator's stay at the Hotel Rus--hunts for an apartment one bitterly cold day with the help of Saskia, a woman he has just met. Along the way, they encounter various friends of hers and are invited to a party. Initially, then, it seems that this intriguing, rather low-key debut will unfold as the painstakingly detailed account of a day in the life of a disaffected man, and that it does. But the story deepens in unexpected ways. While battling slush and stopping with Saskia for a snack, our narrator reflects on his past in dribs and drabs, revealing his former life in the U.S. Navy and then as a highly paid military contractor ("The Army didn't trust you if your fees weren't preposterous"). It's one quick step to more telling reflections on the uses of memory and the pervasiveness of violence, but to Baxter's credit, he doesn't burst forth with a melodramatic moment that wholly explains or changes his character's life. VERDICT Baxter's thoughtful, quietly penetrating book is for those seeking more than a quick read. [See Prepub Alert, 6/10/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A powerful and elegant debut novel about love, memory, exile, and war.
One snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search for an apartment to rent. The Apartment follows the couple across a blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future-their cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to cure violence with violence.
A novel about how our relationships to others-and most importantly to ourselves-alters how we see the world, The Apartment perfectly captures the peculiarity and...
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