Old Men in Love: John Tunnock's Posthumous Papers
Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2010. Gray, Alasdair. First American Edition. Hard Cover. Fine / Fine. Item #2354742
ISBN: 9781931520690
First American edition. An exceptional copy. Binding tight and square, pages clean, bright, and unmarked.
311 pp. Will Self review on front jacket flap. Though the introduction is credited to Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar, this is an acronymic pseudonym formed from the author's own name (including his middle name, James). Alasdair Gray's unique melding of humor and metafiction at once hearken back to Laurence Sterne and sit beside today's literary mash-ups with equal comfort. Old Men in Love is smart, down-to-earth, funny, bawdy, politically inspired, dark, multi-layered, and filled with the kind of intertextual play that Gray delights in. As with Gray's previous novel Poor Things, several partial narratives are presented together. Here the conceit is that they were all discovered in the papers of the late John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow teacher who started a number of novels in settings as varied as Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset, and Britain under New Labour. This is the first US edition (updated with the author's corrections from the UK edition) of a novel that British critics lauded as one of the best of Gray's long career. Beautifully printed in two colors throughout and featuring Gray's trademark strong design, Old Men in Love will stand out from everything else on the shelf. Fifty percent is fact and the rest is possible, but it must be read to be believed.
Price: $75.00