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A legendary work of literary wizardry in which the author reckons with Christopher Columbus, America, myth, and his great-grandfather Herman Melville. First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's literary masterpiece in which he attempts to purge the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers-one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song. Includes an introduction by Rick Moody (The Ice Storm).
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Reviews
"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."
William Gass, The New York Times
"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology-all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."
Publishers Weekly
"Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."
Robert Creeley