Arrived at this author by references of Chuck Palahniuk, you end up discovering that narrative buried under official currents, labeled various and other ways of analyzing literature to end up excluding outsiders like Tom. Only that in those escapes of such important authors, restless readers end up leading to an uncontrollable sink.
The Tom Spanbauer outside of genres is a guy who writes crudely to awaken unexpected contrasts. There is no love without hate or vital adventure without abysses. Everything that happens to Spanbauer's characters leads us to that notion of the existence of everything by its opposite. Because the radical vision of the circumstances of the protagonists of it flashes from one side to another from total darkness to the most complete lucidity.
In spite of everything, still escaping from the frame with that taste for the subversive, the disruptive and even the lurid, Spanbauer is pure realism, that realism where personalities are drawn escaping from the fake mediocrity, from the normality that hardly paints in his ideology so transgressive as true. So to read Spanbauer one must cross oneself considering that what Bukowski it was just a cartoon. You may like it or not, but it is a work without fuss or accommodations...
Top 3 recommended books by Tom Spanbauer
The man who fell in love with the moon
While normality passes with its usual rhythm of everyday life, the ominous also happens describing new life paths immersed in a disturbing perception of the world. They are great little intra-stories like this one that point to the wild when man is a wolf to man, as Hobbes would say. Only that the human being always seeks a final redemption once the ominous circumstances have been overcome or sublimated.
The narrator of this story is Shed, a boy who earns his living in a hotel in the small town of Excellent, Idaho. The business is run by the authoritarian Ida Richelieu, a prostitute and mayor of the town. When Shed is raped at gunpoint by the man who murders his Indian mother that same night, Ida takes over raising him. As he investigates his lost identity, the boy becomes part of an eccentric family of misfits and outcasts, including the beautiful Alma Hatch and Dellwood Barker, a half-mad cowboy with green eyes and the air of a philosopher.
The story of an education and an initiation, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a contemporary classic about sexuality, race and love. Spanbauer's most emblematic work is a mythical, evocative and carnal tale; a celebration of sexuality in all its forms and a deep reflection on the relationship of men with nature and language.
Now is the time
The most human learning is, going back in the history of literature, the evolution of Lazarillo de Tormes. Or also the adventures of Oliver Twist of the Dickens more committed to that realism above all sincere to an open grave. In a certain way, this story connects with the idea of ​​presenting learning parallel to growth as nakedness before a world that begins to hover like a pitch-dark night over the human being who begins to look for his place.
Pocatello, Idaho, 1967. Rigby John Klusener is seventeen years old and has decided to emancipate himself. It's time to leave his parents' home, and in this way, with a flower behind his ear and his thumb up, he walks along the highway towards San Francisco, a city that he imagines in his dreams as paradise itself.
Now is the Time is the story of how Rigby John Klusener finds his place in the world. How he is moving away from the strict restrictions of a very religious farming family and a hermetic community that has isolated itself from the cultural explosion that takes place in the United States in that decade.
I loved you more
A more urban story, with that feeling of loneliness among the masses. But always that notion of events as a delivery and a commitment to what comes from within despite the usual disagreement with the circumstances.
Ben was delusional in believing that he could love a man and then a woman, "two extraordinary people, two unique ways of loving, from different decades, on opposite ends of the continent," and walk away unscathed.
Hank and Ben established a deep friendship in XNUMXs New York while learning to become writers. Hank was straight, and Ben, despite having been with women, a full-fledged homosexual. In the XNUMXs, Ben, now without Hank and suffering from AIDS, fell in love with Ruth, one of his creative writing students in Portland.
The day Hank appeared on the scene again, nothing could prevent that famous rule of three from being fulfilled, according to which a trio always ends up adding a fourth or subtracting one. And in this case it was Ben who was left out.
Seven years after the publication of his last novel, Tom Spanbauer returns to the literary scene with another unforgettable protagonist. Through a pulsating narrative that moves between an incisive tone and the most absolute tenderness, Yo te quise más reaffirms Spanbauer as one of the emblematic authors of North American letters.
