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Monoville

Monoville

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商品簡介

When the moral imagination becomes crippled or atrophied thru disuse and therefore incapable of defining the physical spaces we inhabit, it can seek to reinflate itself by conscripting darker more mercenary forces. We then learn by trial and error what physical and emotional lines we are willing to cross, where they are, and that sometimes those lines themselves seem to shift without our volition or knowledge.

This compelling, well-written novel set in the post-gold-rush American West portrays the uncharted waters of the moral imagination,--This story revolves primarily around the of the activities of the U.S. Coastal Survey of the West Coast. We examine the psychology of our anti-tagonist who lurks among the survey scientists, artists and engineers, tracinc his own path of what can only be called iconic creative/destruction. He learns that individuals who seek a rational existence outside the sphere of society's conventional standards find themselves progressively marginalized until their actions seem to become the equivalent of and indistinguishable from irrationality and their only true rationale may be found in the commission of further crimes. It is the utterly convincing rationality of Mandelbrot Feuerstool's irrationality that makes him such an intriguing character.

Feuerstool's disaffection with conventional standards and morality begins with a rather trivial disagreement with the Captain of the Active, John Alden, over the ship's milk ration which occurs in the context of the shipboard suicide of the Captain of the Ewing, Archibald MacRae, and it is the former not the latter that seems to preoccupy the mind of Captain, John Alden.

Forced to endure the inevitable suspicions and murmuring judgment from his shipmates for witnessing the shipboard suicide of their captain aboard the U.S.C.S. survey ship Ewing, Mandelbrot Feuerstool, the ship's steward is set adrift both physically and mentally; he flees into a wilderness with ill-described borders and with no marker buoys to guide him and unable to map the boundaries of such a shrouded existence he will seek his answer and illumination in the commission of (another?) murder,-- and then another as he acquires a talent for this gruesome form of dialectic.

As Feuerstool learns, most often what we are punished for, are the more trivial crimes which we have failed give their due like carelessness and lack of innovation. He flees life at sea after the mysterious appearance of a washing machine on the deck of the Active. With the help of Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens, he becomes a State Senator in the newly formed Territory of Nevada before being arrested on the relatively insignificant charge of coin counterfeiting.

The premise that we as human beings are constantly confronted with the question of how to sound the depths and boundaries of meaning in the consequences of our actions haunts our main character who, pursued by demons real and imagined, reaches the perhaps despicable conclusion that one is always left with the option of straddling the line; accepting the punishment and judgment while rejecting the basis of that judgment. For those who take matters into their own hands thus it becomes their obligation to question whether those most responsible for meting out his punishment are perhaps themselves so blindly committed to retribution that they therefore become in the end more inherently heinous and short-sighted,--more dangerous than those they seek to pursue, prosecute and punish. Feuerstool must seek to find the depths and limits of his own rather fluid morality in the form of his retribution.

The background for the story is the supposedly amoral transformation that the physical survey unwittingly works on the character of the West and its environs and the corresponding unwilling but almost inevitably amoral transformation of of Feuerstool himself.

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定價:100 1215
無庫存,下單後進貨
(到貨天數約30-45天)

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