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"A dense tapestry of memory... The story begins ominously with the image of a wrecked train, then shifts to Paris, where a weekend trip to the countryside of Alsace is undertaken by [three] old acquaintances . . . Michelsen juxtaposes the progress of their (somewhat wary) reunion with detailed flashbacks from each one's point of view... The narrative's backward and forward plunges are both involving and baffling, but Michelsen makes all the necessary linkages, and deepens the novel's texture impressively... An unusual tale, a bit reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry. Initially forbidding, ultimately very rewarding indeed."—Kirkus Reviews
A richly imagined novel of desire, betrayal, and the ways in which lives and history are shaped by memory.
G. F. Michelsen’s most recent novel Hard Bottom was acclaimed as “a beautifully written, impeccably crafted book” by Publishers Weekly, while To Sleep With Ghosts was hailed as “compelling” and “lyrical” by the Washington Post. His dazzling new novel demonstrates the ways in which circumstance, choice, and chance combine to shape our lives, and it explores the human desire to impose order retroactively on one’s existence through the story-telling nature of memory.
Eleven years after the event that first brought them together, three people are reunited in Paris: Frank Duggan, an American international aid worker turned arms dealer turned teacher of international relations; Eva Koszegfalvi, a Hungarian neuro-psychiatrist working on the nature of memory and how its myriad stories are filed and retrieved within the brain; and Ludovic Rohan, a French marine archaeologist marginalized by academic politics who now works on movies requiring underwater filming. More than a decade earlier, they had been among a group of hostages held for ten days at the Continental Hotel in Xelaju, Central America, by Indian revolutionaries—a plight from which the hostages were saved only by a desperate act of betrayal. Reunited by a chance encounter, they decide to travel to Alsace together for a holiday weekend. Through a fine tapestry of memory, story, and sense impressions, woven by the physical thread of their journey into central France, the three come upon the secret of that earlier betrayal, as well as the deep interplay of deception, desire, and history that unites their lives.
"While the basic plot is one that would attract the mystery and thriller crowd (particularly with our current concern about terrorism), it is, in the end, a rather sophisticated work."—Library Journal
The Art and Practice of Explosion won the honorable mention in the literary fiction category of ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award.
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G. F. MICHELSEN is author of Hard Bottom (UPNE, 2000) and To Sleep with Ghosts: A Novel of Africa (1992). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
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