I Am Radar, Reif Larsen
I Am Radar, Reif Larsen
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I Am Radar

Author: Reif Larsen

Narrator: Adam Grupper

Unabridged: 25 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/24/2015


Synopsis

In this kaleidoscopic novel, a love-struck radio operator discovers a secret society offering mind-bending performance art in war zones around the world. In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists-who stage experimental art for people suffering under war-time sieges- Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. In I Am Radar, acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen-the author of The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet-delivers a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic. In the wreckage of the twentieth century, the characters of I Am Radar hunt for what life and art can still be salvaged. During the civil wars of Yugoslavia, two brothers walk shockingly different paths: one into the rapacious paramilitary forces terrorizing the countryside, the other into the surreal world of besieged Belgrade. In arctic Norway, resistance schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a secret Nazi nuclear reactor to stage a dramatic art performance, with no witnesses. In the years before Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, an expatriate French landowner adopts an abandoned native child and creates a lifelong scientific experiment of his new son's education. In the modern-day Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the world's largest library in the futile hope that the books will cement a peace in the war-torn country. All of these stories are united in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where a radio operator named Radar struggles with a horrible medical affliction, a set of hapless parents, and-only now, as an adult-all too ordinary white skin. A sophisticated, highly addictive reading experience that draws on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and performance art, Larsen's I Am Radar is a novel somehow greater than all of its remarkable parts, a breathtaking and unparalleled joyride through the worst that humanity has to offer only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kate on February 02, 2015

I am Radar begins with the story of Radar, a black boy born to white parents in New Jersey in the 1970s. His mother’s frantic search for answers to this medical mystery eventually brings her into contact with a bizarre group of scientists and performance artists in Norway. His father, traumatised by......more

Goodreads review by Loring on May 28, 2015

It takes a deft hand to write effective adult fairy tales, a genre distinct from fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction, though sharing traits with all three. The writer is freed from the constraints of rational logic, but must use care not to insert too many colorful but extraneous myths that mig......more

Goodreads review by Briar's Reviews on February 03, 2019

I am Radar by Reif Larsen is a character study of a black man born to white parents. This book was very slow and hard for me to read, I have to be upfront about that. The book is written beautifully and Reif Larsen is a terrific writer, but I just couldn't get into this book. It took me months to get......more

Goodreads review by zxvasdf on January 25, 2015

I am Radar is a molecular orbital, whose narratives are occupied by Reif Larsen’s fevered imagination. The man has painstakingly crafted a secret history of the world where everything is entangled; a history of a history, if you could, in which he tracks Per Røed-Larsen’s history of the performance......more

Goodreads review by Jill on March 24, 2015

I Am Radar reminds me of a big, frisky St. Bernard puppy who wants to be loved and who ends up making you laugh with delight at all its tricks. What words would I use to describe the novel? Audacious, swaggering, inimitable, bold, ambitious…well, you get the drift. Despite over 650 pages, it’s remark......more