Trance - Softcover

Sorrentino, Christopher

3.5

190 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224075977 ISBN 13: 9780224075978

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2005

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In 1974, a tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then takes the guerrilla name 'Tania' and shocks the world by choosing to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Why else would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiance, her comfortable home? Why would she adopt the SLA's cri de guerre, 'Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People'?

Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades - the pompous and abusive General Teko and his duplicitous lieutenant, Yolanda - into hiding, where they will remain for the next sixteen months. These are the months of Tania's sentimental education.

Trance, Christopher Sorrentino's mesmerising and brilliant second novel, leaps from the pages of history into satire and myth. It takes the reader on an underground tour across a beleaguered America in the company of scam artists, visionaries, cultists, and a mismatched gang of middle-class militants who typify the guiding conceit of their time, that of self-renewal.

Insightful, compassionate, scathing, and moving, Trance is a virtuoso performance, placing Sorrentino in the first rank of American novelists.

(2004-09-22)

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Review:

'This substantial book cleverly reinvents this story with a handsome helping of historical and contemporary satire' -- The Times

'powerful satire of American myth-making' -- John Burnside, The Scotsman

...scathing, gripping and profound, this book is a meditation and a provocation... -- Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

A bravura epic that unfolds cinematically yet with linguistic brilliance to convey the failure of 1970s radical lifestyles. -- London Metro

Sorrentino’s writing is smart and vibrant, slangy when necessary, and always appropriately allusive. -- Times Literary Supplement

TRANCE is a work of startling insight, marvelously and masterfully evoking the grim stuff of true American nightmares -- Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days

TRANCE will be placed on the very highest shelf of that art which explains the 20th Century to the 21st. -- Jonathan Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude

From the Publisher:

A brilliant new American novelist arrives with a stunning dissection of the Patti Hearst kidnapping.

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