descriptif du fournisseur
From the revered, Oscar-winning, stunningly original screenwriter comes a potently surreal, wide-ranging, and hysterical debut novel about the finding and losing and making of a masterpiece. This is a novel that could only be written by Charlie Kaufman, legendary screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich . When B., a self-important, pretentious, washed-up film critic, rents an apartment in St. Augustine, Florida to research his essay that nobody will read on a long-forgotten film that nobody saw, he's got no idea there's a genuine, undiscovered masterpiece living next door. His neighbor, Ingo, a Bible-quoting, foul-mouthed, form-shifting 116-year-old, has been working on the movie for ninety-eight years. The movie is three months long, beginning as a silent film from the early 20th century, and includes scheduled breaks for bathroom, eating, and sleeping, during which it infects your dream state. When Ingo dies midway through the viewing, B. is certain that Ingo's legacy will make his as well, and rushes back home to New York to claim this monumental discovery for the world. But when the canisters of film catch fire on the way, destroying the film and putting B. into a three-month coma from which he suffers critical memory loss, all that's left is a single frame. B. makes it his life's mission to remember the movie, but where does his memory end and his quickly unraveling life begin? As the lines of reality, memory, and dream blur, what ensues is an absurdly wide-ranging adventure through hypnotic memory recovery, film history, puppetry, vaudevillian comedy, biblical references, metacritiques, goo-like lobster creatures called globsters, an alternative history of the lunar space landing, a giant with leading man good looks found living in a cave, and multiple characters using different forms of time travel simultaneously. It contains just about every idea you could think of, and yet the more you ruminate on it, the bigger and richer it becomes. It's filled with knotty concepts, but it's a fluid, profoundly sad, devastatingly funny, and, ultimately, deeply human read.
