Angelica's Grotto: A Novel - Hardcover

Hoban, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786708786 ISBN 13: 9780786708789

Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

Harold Klein, who has strangely lost his "inner voice," unexpectedly discovers a pornographic website called Angela's Grotto, where he engages in uninhibited virtual sex, which brings him face-to-face with the website's creator, Melissa Bottomley, an academic sex researcher in need of funding, in a that examines the connection between art, pornography, culture, politics, and privacy.

About this title

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 alterego 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

Synopsis:

Altogether original, at once searing and amusing, this darkly comic novel confronts Harold Klein, now in his infirm seventies, with a strange malady -- the loss of his "inner voice" -- and introduces him to the steamy world of Internet sex. Inexplicably bereft of the mental faculty that would under normal circumstances keep him from blurting out, uncensored, the first thought that pops into his head, art connoisseur Klein wanders one evening into a pornographic Web site, Angelica's Grotto. An ongoing on-line dialogue, totally without verbal inhibition on Klein's part, eventually brings him face-to-face with the brains behind the grotto, an academic sex researcher named Melissa Bottomley. Harold Klein's erotic odyssey takes him not only through unimagined erogenous zones but also into arcane corners of the art world, as he seeks to meet Melissa's need for funding and she his for sexual gratification. As Klein strives to reconcile new desires with old habits, author Russell Hoban compellingly explores the dark relations between art and pornography, acts virtual and real, culture and politics, revelation and privacy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0786708786
• ISBN 13: 9780786708789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288