Lev Grossman

Aug 10 2011

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

In my review of The Magicians I offered this opinion as to what its author was up to:

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

The just released sequel, The Magician King, picks up where this left off and ads the question: “What if you found the fantasy land of your dreams but eventually got bored and restless? “What if it wasn’t enough?”

Quentin and his friends are now the kings and queens of Fillory, but the days and nights of royal luxury are starting to pall. After a morning hunt takes a sinister turn, Quentin and his old friend Julia charter a magical sailing ship and set out on an errand to the wild outer reaches of their kingdom. Their pleasure cruise becomes an adventure when the two are unceremoniously dumped back into the last place Quentin ever wants to see: his parent’s house in Chesterton, Massachusetts. And only the black, twisted magic that Julia learned on the streets can save them.

Magician King is still a dark, adult modern version of the young adult or childhood fantasy adventure and it still contemplates the question what if magic, and the fantasy land of your childhood, was real. But then it takes this background and foundation and forces the characters to wrestle with the complexity and difficulty of adulthood that remain even if magic exists. What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be willing to really give of yourself to something or someone larger than your own selfish interests. Does the happy ending still result?

Along the way Grossman also explores what the architecture or building blocks of magic might look like and how human interaction with that – past, present and future – might work or not work.

More after the jump …

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By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 1 • Tags: , ,

Mar 1 2010

Lev Grossman explains bad reviews

Tongue planted  firmly in cheek, Lev Grossman offers this enlightening explanation for bad reviews of The Magicians:

Sometimes people point out to me that although The Magicians gets some good reviews, it also gets its share of hate as well, and what’s up with that? I’ve looked into this, and I think I’ve figured it out. See, sometimes demons ascend from a lower realm to this one, possess a human and devour him or her from within, like some hideous larval parasite, leaving behind a hollow, ambulatory man-rind in that person’s place, a humanoid mockery of all that is good and true. Those demons then head straight for a keyboard and review The Magicians online. And some of those demons have really crap taste in books. So I hope that clears that up.

By Kevin Holtsberry • Views • 0 • Tags: , ,

Oct 1 2009

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Like so many, a big part of my becoming a devoted reader at a young age was the magical books of fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I jumped from these “classics” to many others (magical worlds like the humorous  Xanth and the adventurous Pern).  And I still read fantasy; even young adult fantasy like Harry Potter and the explosion of works that followed in the wake of that phenomenon.

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

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By Kevin Holtsberry • Reviews • 2 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Jul 23 2009

In the Mail: troubled youth fiction edition

–> The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Kirkus Reviews

Grossman (Codex, 2004, etc.) imagines a sorcery school whose primary lesson seems to be that bending the world to your will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When Quentin manages to find Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and pass its baffling entrance exam, he finally feels at home somewhere. Back in the real world, Quentin and fellow students, like brilliant, crippling shy Alice and debonair, sexually twisted Eliot, were misfits, obsessed with a famous children’s series called Fillory and Further (The Chronicles of Narnia, very lightly disguised). Brakebills teaches them how to tap into the universe’s flow of energy to cast spells; they’re ready to graduate and . . . then what? “You can do nothing or anything or everything,” cautions Alice, who has become Quentin’s lover. “You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.” Her warning seems apt as he indulges in aimless post-grad drinking and partying, eventually betraying Alice with two other Brakebills alums.

The discovery that Fillory actually exists offers Quentin a chance to redeem himself with Alice and find a purpose for his life as well. But Fillory turns out to be an even more dangerous, anarchic place than the books suggested, and it harbors a Beast who’s already made a catastrophic appearance at Brakebills. The novel’s climax includes some spectacular magical battles to complement the complex emotional entanglements Grossman has deftly sketched in earlier chapters. The bottom line has nothing to do with magic at all: “There’s no getting away from yourself,” Quentin realizes. After a dreadful loss that he discovers is the result of manipulation by forces that care nothing about himor his friends, Quentin chooses a bleak, circumscribed existence in the nonmagical world. Three of his Brakebills pals return to invite him back to Fillory: Does this promise new hope, or threaten more delusions?Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided-fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed.

–> In This Way I Was Saved by Brian DeLeeuw

Publishers Weekly

DeLeeuw’s spellbinding debut is told from the point of view of a being who assumes the persona and desires of a boy’s repressed self. The mysterious narrator encounters six-year-old Luke in Central Park, where Luke gives him a life and a name, Daniel. Daniel has no memory of consciousness before meeting Luke, but as the story moves forward into Luke’s college years, it becomes clear that he has a history distinct from Luke’s own. He quickly learns that he’s stronger when Luke is troubled, and, luckily, there’s much in Luke’s life to distress him. Meanwhile, Claire, Luke’s divorced mother, runs a publishing company founded by her mother, and when Luke comes across a novel about a doppelgänger the company published decades earlier, Daniel realizes it may offer clues to his own secrets and persuades Luke to destroy it, much to Claire’s despair. DeLeeuw delivers a neat bundling of the classic story of a spirit possessing an innocent with the Jungian shadow self, but in the end readers will be somewhat disappointed that he neglects to answer some of the more intriguing questions he poses about Luke’s family.

By Kevin Holtsberry • In The Mail • 0 • Tags: , ,