description: Eclipse Fever is as complex as Abish's avant-garde masterpiece, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning How German Is It . Set in Mexico today, in a high-gloss world of intellect and society, Eclipse Fever explores the reaches of corruption and the limits of power in politics, in business, in culture. A constant course of suspense and psychological tension underlies its concern with art, emotional attachment, and the differing needs of men and women. The people whose lives Alejandro, one of Mexico's most respected literary critics; his estranged wife, Mercedes, whom he longs for and suspects of openly conducting an affair with a celebrated American writer; Bonny, the writer's 17-year-old daughter, a runaway, who is made witness to a sequence of calamitous events that culminates in murder; Preston, an American industrialist, and his sexually frustrated wife, Rita; and Pech, the unscrupulous art dealer who is the source of Preston's illegitimate collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. As the lives and emotional fates of these people press together, as they buckle and collapse, the novel holds up a mirror to the moment in which we the end of a century, the end of a millennium, the perils, the temptations, the hysteria just below the surface. With the publication of Eclipse Fever , Walter Abish, already the recipient of great critical acclaim, establishes himself as a major American writer.
language: English
title: Eclipse Fever
titlecomplete: Eclipse Fever
genres: Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America
ratings_count: 69
publisher: Random House Value Publishing