Parsifal

"Parsifal's entire quest might have nothing to do with his cup and everything to do with the lost nuclear associated with it. This is pretty banal stuff, I know, but it's also pretty deep stuff, and Krusoe is sufficiently artful at scrambling his oppositions and his timeline that the experience of reading "Parsifal" is the opposite of banal.""The Rumpus" ..".dreamlike, at times even poetic, meditations on good, evil, blindness, and sight." "Daily Beast," Hot Reads "The words of Paul Verlaine -- 'What is this sadness that creeps into my heart?' -- recur throughout the novel, and Krusoe replays them in jazz-like variations that accrue meaning and emotion until we come to see Parsifal as a tragic clown, a lonely fool without a heart, an emblem of the emptiness of a life lived, or a quest undertaken, without love.""Oregonian" "Krusoe s latest is a self-reflective coming-of-age story wrapped in a fable and sprinkled with wry observations"Parsifal"becomes a piquant commentary on tensions between nostalgia and reality, the past and the present, and humanity s need for myths. "Publishers Weekly" "Set against an absurd backdrop of planetary warfare, in which myriad objects (car parts, paperclips, appliances) tumble from the clouds, and the earth shoots ash and smoke skyward, Parsifal s story arrives in snapshots and snippets, short clips and punch lines. Krusoe s swift prose blends references to epic poetry with contemporary fiction techniques, a hybrid of lyrical refrain (a la Carole Maso s "Ava," 1993) and agile irony (dramatic, situational, cosmic) into a quirky, twenty-first-century take on themes of reclamation and identity." "Booklist""