The Man Without a Shadow, Joyce Carol Oates
The Man Without a Shadow, Joyce Carol Oates
1 Rating(s)
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99

The Man Without a Shadow
A Novel

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Susan Hanfield

Unabridged: 13 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/19/2016


Synopsis

In this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examines the mysteries of memory, personality, and identity and pierces the enigmatic force that drives human lives—love.In 1965, neuroscientist Margot Sharpe meets the attractive, charismatic Elihu Hoopes—the “man without a shadow”—whose devastated memory, unable to store new experiences or to retrieve the old, will make him the most famous and most studied amnesiac in history. Over the course of the next thirty years, Margot herself becomes famous for her experiments with E. H.—and inadvertently falls in love with him, despite the ethical ambiguity of their affair, and though he remains forever elusive and mysterious to her, haunted by mysteries of the past.The Man Without a Shadow tracks the intimate, illicit relationship between Margot and Eli, as scientist and subject embark upon an exploration of the labyrinthine mysteries of the human brain. Where does “memory” reside? Where is “love”? Is it possible to love an individual who cannot love you, who cannot “remember” you from one meeting to the next?Made vivid by her exceptional eye for detail and her keen insight into the human psyche, The Man Without A Shadow is a unique story of forbidden love, a kind of secret, evolving marriage, depicted in Joyce Carol Oates’s tight, impassioned prose. It is an uncanny, ambitious, and structurally complex novel that penetrates the mind and illuminates the heart.

About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Britta on October 04, 2016

A difficult book to rate. The book is strongest when it tries to give us a glimpse into the world of Eli Hoopes, a man with no capacity to retain memories after his illness at age 37. The parts about memory and identity are moving and haunting. But the book is significantly less strong when it comes......more

Goodreads review by Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) on March 02, 2024

3.5 Stars Joyce Carol Oats is an author who I continually pick up because she is so prolific with such a range of stories. I have always been fascinated by the real life case so it was interesting to read this piece of historical fiction surrounding this man. I see other criticisms of this book becau......more

Goodreads review by Marjorie on January 10, 2016

Elihu Hoopes is the man without a shadow. Due to an infection and high fever, he sustained brain damage and has lost the ability to retain memory for longer than 70 seconds. Even though he doesn’t remember her from one meeting to the next, the neuroscientist Margot who is studying and testing him, s......more

Goodreads review by Judy on June 23, 2016

I wouldn't say this was my favorite JCO novel but it was surely the most interesting. Elihu Hoopes is an amnesiac whose short term memory only goes back 70 seconds. Margot Sharpe is beginning graduate school and has been accepted into the neuropsychology program headed by Milton Ferris, a harsh ta......more

Goodreads review by Susan on February 03, 2016

Prototypical JCO in some ways, and yet it's one of her best. Incantatory, intelligent exploration of the evolution of delusional romantic obsession contrasted with the constant of an amnesia that only allows for seventy seconds of short-term memory. Lots of fascinating stuff about neuroscience, the......more