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Review "Himmer's story is fun and exhilarating, especially as it heads toward its heroic climax."--Publishers Weekly "When a covert mission sends Oscar, a low-ranking employee in the Bureau of Ice Prognostication, to the arctic, he must confront the perils and pains of a life lived under the veil of secrecy. Fram is an extraordinary meditation on the critical flaws in the systems we hold dear, and the human costs of those flaws. Steve Himmer writes with such uncommon intelligence and sorrow and grace, I would follow him anywhere--into the arctic and beyond."--Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me, The Isle of Youth, and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us "A miniature bureaucratic epic somewhere between David Foster Wallace and Jules Verne, Fram is a funny, sharp-eyed, fantastical inquiry into one of the great questions of modern life: where do we really go when we go to work?"--Will Wiles, author of The Way Inn and Care of Wooden Floors "Steve Himmer's Fram arrives in the garb of a DeLilloesque polyurethane shell, savvy and hilarious about the pervasiveness and hypnotic allure of artifice and Big Data, all of the signal-fizz of contemporary America. But under that lurks the pulse of naturalism, an unabashed zeal for exploration and adventure and the magnetic tug of the raw, open wilderness, and in this unique, timely, and highly-entertaining amalgam, he invents a north that is ever reinventing itself."--Tim Horvath, author of Understories About the Author Steve Himmer is the author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade (2011) and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including The Millions, Ploughshares, Post Road, Hobart, 3: AM Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review. He lives with his wife and daughter near Boston, where he teaches at Emerson College.
L**T
Truly inventive, fun, and provocative
What if it was your job to pretend? At the secret US agency known as the Bureau of Ice Prognostication, Oscar spends his days speculating about the geographic and cultural possibilities of Arctic territories as a substitute for actual exploration. Why? Because the Russians are doing it too. When Oscar is suddenly called into the field for a real mission to the Arctic, he learns first hand that a kind of comic strip version of the cold war is still going on, one that surprisingly closer to home than he ever imagined. This is a rollicking satire that moves fast but with many contemplative moments to savor.
V**B
Seinfield goes to the Arctic
I really, really disliked this novel. I am very interested in novels and memoirs about Arctic and Antarctic exploration so you'd think I would have liked Fram, but this is a sort of post-modern version. I think it is meant to be deeply and brilliantly ironic but instead it was just sort of trite. I felt sorry for the central character but he also felt sorry for himself.
M**S
Testimony to Imagination & Dreams (and Polar Exploration)
REVIEW: FRAM by SteveFRAM is an enduring literary novel, a testimony to imagination and dreams, to character and unshakable optimism. Strewn throughout is the persistent undercurrent of ironic humor at the expense of bureaucracy. (Specifically Federal, but really, bureaucracy everywhere: anywhere that reality doesn't matter but the recorded perception of reality does). To achieve such testimony, protagonist Oliver, a middle-aged married employee in the Federal Bureau of Ice Prognostication, is abruptly summoned to fulfillment of his lifetime dream, as he is sent to the Arctic he has never seen, but of which he has always dreamed (and whose virtual reality he has for years manipulated). Now the way is open for Oliver's becoming, with an unforgettable and inspiring closure.I reviewed a digital ARC provided via Edelweiss for review purposes. No fees were exchanged.
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