Angelica's Grotto - Softcover

Hoban, Russell

3.4

160 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747547238 ISBN 13: 9780747547235

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2000

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Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which seventy-two-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities, known to medical consultants as 'he who declines to hop the twig', may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going on in his head. 'You're a tiger from the neck up, Professor,' says Melissa, the brains behind the website, when at last Klein faces the object of his desire. Harold first visits Angelica's Grotto after losing his 'inner voice', that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting out the first thing that pops into our heads and finding ourselves in Casualty as a result of it. Harold consults a therapist about this new lack of mental privacy and also has one-to-one onscreen dialogue in the Grotto. 'If I had an inner voice I wouldn't be telling you all this,' he explains to the as-yet-unmet Melissa. But when the flesh-and-blood Melissa and her large and well-hung colleague Leslie enter his life he finds it's good to keep the angina medicine at the ready. Harold Klein's odyssey takes him not only through erogenous zones but into various corners of the London art world, down the underground and up the buses.

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Review:

Harold Klein is a 72-year-old Philadelphia-raised art historian, now living in London. A resolute patient--cholecystectomy, appendectomy, prostate resection, hydrocele operation, triple bypass, cataract surgery, right-lung lobectomy, diabetes, atheroma, ischaemia, myocardial infarcts (two), hiatus hernia, vertigo, broken ribs, broken nose, you name it--Klein finds novel self-concern when one morning, he stops hearing his "inner voice", which has the embarrassing side-effect of causing him to blurt out what he's thinking. This propels him toward a new string of medical experts, psychiatrists and psychotherapists who attempt to find the cause of this new and mysterious affliction. At the same time, surfing the Internet, Klein's interest is caught Ingres' painting Angelica Saved by Ruggiero on the homepage of porn site Angelica's Grotto. His fascination with Angelica and the graphic rape stories detailed on her site leads him--or his alter-ego Ruggiero--into the uncharted waters of his own sexuality.

If that all sounds a bit off-the-wall, it's what readers have come to expect from Russell Hoban, an unpredictable and prolific maverick of a writer, probably best known for his Turtle Diary. Angelica's Grotto is of course a very funny book, its outrageous premise becoming more believable by the minute. But it is also an innately intelligent, highly original pondering of some of today's newly pressing problems of communication and interiority in a world committed to surfing, where "intimacy" means one-on-one-on-line. --Alan Stewart

About the Author:

Russell Hoban is the author of many extraordinary novels including THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ, TURTLE DIARY, RIDDLEY WALKER, MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER. He has also written some classic books for children including THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD and THE FRANCES books. He lives in London.

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