John GriesemerCritiques

Sent to Greenland by mistake and the crazy time there.

No-one Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer (2002)

Die Verlegung des ersten Transatlantikkabels und das Auslaufen der Great Eastern, des langezeit größten Schiffes der Welt, bilden den historischen Hintergrund für Griesemers Roman. Sie stehen für den Fortschritt, die „Wunder des Zeitalters“, wie es am Ende des Buches heißen wird. Wie der titelgebende „Rausch“ reißen die neue Zeit und ihre Möglichkeiten die Menschen mit. Im Englischen heißt der Titel des Buches allerdings „Signals and Noise“ und das passt noch viel besser! Denn es sind leise Signale, die unentwegt gesendet und empfangen werden: Signale durch das Kabel, Signale der Liebe und des Begehrens, Signale aus dem Jenseits. Lärm lässt uns unempfindlich werden für diese Signale - heute ist es gang und gäbe, dass wir über den Atlantik Kontakt haben, ist Lärm allerorten.
Chester Ludlow, der Ingenieur des Transatlantikkabels ist verheiratet mit Franny. Sie haben vor kurzem ihre kleine Tochter Betty verloren. Augenzeuge war Chesters Bruder Otis,ein genialischer Mann mit vielen Talenten und ohne Richtung. Franny tauert sehr und versucht mit Otis Hilfe Kontakt zu Betty aufzunehmen, während Chester mit einer Show Geld für die Fortführung des Kabelprojektes eintreibt. Begleitet wird er dabei von der Musikerin Katharina, in die er sich verliebt und mit der er eine Beziehung eingeht. Eine weitere Hauptperson ist der Maler Trace, der sowohl das Schiffsprojekt als auch das Kabelprojekt für Zeitungen abbildet.
Das Buch hat also viele Handlungsstränge und vor allem anfangs gefiel es mir nicht so recht. Ich war oft versucht, aufzuhören oder querzulesen. Zwar war der historische Hintergrund gut recherchiert und interessant, doch die Verknüpfung mit den eigentümlichen persönlichen Geschichten wirkte irgendwie einerseits trivial und andererseits künstlich. Allerdings zog mich das Buch dann mehr und mehr in Bann. Ich mochte Jack Trace immer mehr, fand immer mehr Gefallen an Frannys neuer Karriere, konnte der Symbolik der Signale einiges abgewinnen. Alte und neue Welt, Signals and Noise. Im Endeffekt gefiel mir das Buch dann doch sehr gut und die letzten 350 Seiten las ich fast in einem Zug und sehr zufrieden durch.½

Set on a forgotten Army base in Greenland just a few years after the end of the Korean War, this novel has a lot going for it but just doesn’t manage to deliver. Despite the evocative backdrop, the plot is plodding and slow to develop; I was nearly to the end and still waiting for something to happen. The characters are also not quite all there; the love story that forms the backbone of the plot seems contrived, and all the characters seem to be forced into the actions they take by the author, rather than coming to life naturally. The writing showed a lot of promise, though, and I often wished while reading it that it could have been a better book. I’ll certainly give this author another shot, once his storytelling skills have had time to mature.

S&N was one of those everything-including-the-kitchen-sink epics. It had some sex, betrayal, adultery, spiritualism, engineering, insanity, the Big Stink, acting, capitalism, drug use, chicanery, a really big cannon, journalism, and art. It's not perfect but it more or less works capturing events not covered elsewhere in historical fiction- the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. Modernity is being pulled into Victorian England and back-country USA. It doesn't have a historical note which it really needs, to clarify the fictional parts. It does tell the story of the Great Eastern, a ship snakebit from the start, but some devices and events were either dug up deep from the historical archives or made up. I'm still not sure about some of them. I give it a 3.78 rating.

In the 1950's a young corporal in the army named Rudy gets mistakenly sent to Greenland, where a secret military hospital houses severely wounded soldiers from the Korean war. They are kept there until they die, then reported suddenly found to their families (who assumed them missing-in-action) with no details disclosed...

Rudy finds himself assigned to create a newspaper for the hospital base, and with it gets special clearance to enter "the Wing" where the wounded are tended. Feeling a journalistic spirit, he starts to unfold stories about the hospital, the soldiers and wounded there, but as he begins to uncover secrets, things start to unravel around him... Not to mention that he finds his superior's aide/girlfriend irresistibly attractive, and the Colonel is a dangerous man to cross. The setting has an unreal, foreboding quality. The violence at the end was shocking, but did not surprise me too much; after all, they called the time of winter "The Stark Raving Dark." Rudy in particular wrestles with his conscience, occasionally does inexplicably crazy things, is awed by the landscape, confused by his own presence there. In this strange and remote place, he begins to find himself in ways he never did back home where everything was easier, and safer.

from the Dogear Diary

This is all about the laying of the first transatlantic cable. It is supposed to be good but the hardback is too heavy to cart back and forth to work on the train. Too long at 593 pages.

A big, ambitious book with lots of symbol & metaphor (particularly related to the words of the title), much of which undoubtedly went over my head, but also with masterful storytelling & a few really brilliantly renedered scenes (including one in which one of the main characters walks out as far as he can on a collapsed railroad bridge over a gorge; reading it I had the same feeling in my bowels as I do when I'm in a situation that triggers my fear of heights). The characters are wonderfully drawn: the chief engineer on several failed attempts to lay a transatlantic cable; his wife, a former actress who becomes a traveling spiritualist lecturer just before, during, & after the Civil War; the musician with whom the engineer has an affair; the journalist/artist who documents the cable venture; the London prostitute he loves; the cable company promoter; the engineer's brother; and other lesser characters, including President & Mrs. Lincoln. They're all, as I said, richly drawn, though the women less so than the men. The book is set mostly in the years leading up to the Civil War, & the third of the 4 "books" (the shortest one) is set during the Civil War, but this feels less like a Civil War novel (though in that section it had strong similarities to Gob's Grief, in its focus on spiritualism & its relationship to those who lost loved ones in the war), than an introduction to a world on the verge of the Gilded Age, the Age of Science, the Age of Communication. Yet, as with the best historical fiction, it showed how those grand themes played out in the most intimate details of the lives of its characters.

I loved the author's "No One Thinks of Greenland". This is an epic historical fiction that tells the story of the laying of the transAtlantic cable during the 19th century. It's a exciting story
that immerses the reader not only in the events of the time, but the very human struggles - the excitement, the disappointments, the discoveries ..etc - that propel them.½

From the author of No One Thinks of Greenland comes an epic tale about the laying of the transatlantic cable with something for everyone: love, ambition, art, ghosts, a deadly storm at sea and healthy doses of sex. An ambitious work that doesn't always hit the mark, but a rollicking read that has relevance to today's "information age."

An amazing first novel that draws obvious comparisons to Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, but this novel stands on its own merits. Based on the actual existence of a secret military hospital in Greenland during the Korean War, the author takes advantage of the otherworldliness of the arctic landscape to emphasize the loneliness and desolation of men and women stationed far from home. The fact that everyone has to experience six months of darkness ("stark raving dark") after six months of sunshine adds to the character's emotional instability and feelings of temporal dislocation. This is a funny, poignant novel with romance, mystery and the underlying theme of how people deal with their mistakes in life.