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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Heap: A Noveldi Sean Adams
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 Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.  juniperSun | Apr 21, 2024 |    Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing. ) andreas.wpv | Mar 15, 2023 | Sean Adams has written a novel that is at once satire and absurdism. It’s also anthropological in that Los Verticalés, a 500-story apartment building in a desert removed from everything, and its heap of ruins after its sudden collapse, both might be viewed as you would the classic educational toy, the Ant Farm, though in this case you observe humans adapt and function in two different but oddly similar environments, the high tower and the underground heap. In the tower, we watch as residents sort themselves out based on economics and different methods of establishing identity. On and in the heap, we see more egalitarianism, in that everybody pretty much lives in like quarters and works with a single purpose, but not without the usual clawing for status, at least among some. Everybody, tower residents and diggers, shares certain characteristics of modern life, in particular delusion and neuroticism. Overarching the whole thing is that everybody has been been manipulated by a creator of sorts, far off and normally unreachable, but who descends on the dig to reveal himself as inscrutable to ordinary people. Adams tosses in some plotting revolving around a bunch of impersonators, known as the Vocalist Cartel, to move things along, but the focus here is on how absurdly people can behave in a basically absurd world driven by neurotic impulses they can’t seem to control, let alone fathom. You might call it a novel written for times like these, when mass insanity seems to be the new normal, and you might be right. The story itself is simple. Peter Thisbee erected a tower in the desert and people flocked to fill it. Then it suddenly, for reasons unexplained and unknown, collapsed. Those away at the time tell about life in the tower in extracts from their book in progress, “From the Later Years.” These excerpts appear interspersed throughout the novel. After the collapse, Thisbee called for volunteers to dig out bodies and possible survivors, notably Bernard Anders, and again people answered his call. They live in a community named CamperTown and gain as compensation a purpose in their lives. Bernard was a popular radio commentator in the tower. He also appears to be alive and continuing to transmit from deep in the bowels of debris. People listen in worldwide to hear what he says of his predicament and to hear him talk to his brother Orville, who calls in daily, after he has finished his stint digging on and in the heap. This becomes so popular that a media company approaches Orville about monetizing his conversations by slipping in ads for various products. When Orville rejects the offer, the media company removes all means for him to communicate with Bernard and substitutes an impersonator from the Vocal Cartel to fill in for him (though all is not as it seems in this regard and comes to speak to self-identity issues). Orville, at the site because of his brother, whom he hasn’t had much to do with for years, and trying to work through his feelings about his brother and family, goes on a quest to discover who is behind the ersatz Bernard, bringing him into conflict with the Vocal Cartel, while also unearthing secrets kept from the diggers. His quest not only adds purpose to his life, but also to those on the dig closest to him, the other main characters, highly neurotic Lydia, easy-going Hans, and acceptance-seeking Terrance. Adams does a good job of creating two worlds, that of the life the tower and life in CamperTown, including each’s social organization. This serves to magnify ills in our own society in a way that makes them seem absurd and silly, causing you to wonder why we can’t see the dystopian nature of our situation. All very interesting stuff but only for the right readers. Too, while the novel reads well due to Adams’ skillful writing, true appreciation comes in finishing and the afterglow of putting it all together in your own mind so speaks to you in a sensible way. (  ) write-review | Nov 4, 2021 | Sean Adams has written a novel that is at once satire and absurdism. It’s also anthropological in that Los Verticalés, a 500-story apartment building in a desert removed from everything, and its heap of ruins after its sudden collapse, both might be viewed as you would the classic educational toy, the Ant Farm, though in this case you observe humans adapt and function in two different but oddly similar environments, the high tower and the underground heap. In the tower, we watch as residents sort themselves out based on economics and different methods of establishing identity. On and in the heap, we see more egalitarianism, in that everybody pretty much lives in like quarters and works with a single purpose, but not without the usual clawing for status, at least among some. Everybody, tower residents and diggers, shares certain characteristics of modern life, in particular delusion and neuroticism. Overarching the whole thing is that everybody has been been manipulated by a creator of sorts, far off and normally unreachable, but who descends on the dig to reveal himself as inscrutable to ordinary people. Adams tosses in some plotting revolving around a bunch of impersonators, known as the Vocalist Cartel, to move things along, but the focus here is on how absurdly people can behave in a basically absurd world driven by neurotic impulses they can’t seem to control, let alone fathom. You might call it a novel written for times like these, when mass insanity seems to be the new normal, and you might be right. The story itself is simple. Peter Thisbee erected a tower in the desert and people flocked to fill it. Then it suddenly, for reasons unexplained and unknown, collapsed. Those away at the time tell about life in the tower in extracts from their book in progress, “From the Later Years.” These excerpts appear interspersed throughout the novel. After the collapse, Thisbee called for volunteers to dig out bodies and possible survivors, notably Bernard Anders, and again people answered his call. They live in a community named CamperTown and gain as compensation a purpose in their lives. Bernard was a popular radio commentator in the tower. He also appears to be alive and continuing to transmit from deep in the bowels of debris. People listen in worldwide to hear what he says of his predicament and to hear him talk to his brother Orville, who calls in daily, after he has finished his stint digging on and in the heap. This becomes so popular that a media company approaches Orville about monetizing his conversations by slipping in ads for various products. When Orville rejects the offer, the media company removes all means for him to communicate with Bernard and substitutes an impersonator from the Vocal Cartel to fill in for him (though all is not as it seems in this regard and comes to speak to self-identity issues). Orville, at the site because of his brother, whom he hasn’t had much to do with for years, and trying to work through his feelings about his brother and family, goes on a quest to discover who is behind the ersatz Bernard, bringing him into conflict with the Vocal Cartel, while also unearthing secrets kept from the diggers. His quest not only adds purpose to his life, but also to those on the dig closest to him, the other main characters, highly neurotic Lydia, easy-going Hans, and acceptance-seeking Terrance. Adams does a good job of creating two worlds, that of the life the tower and life in CamperTown, including each’s social organization. This serves to magnify ills in our own society in a way that makes them seem absurd and silly, causing you to wonder why we can’t see the dystopian nature of our situation. All very interesting stuff but only for the right readers. Too, while the novel reads well due to Adams’ skillful writing, true appreciation comes in finishing and the afterglow of putting it all together in your own mind so speaks to you in a sensible way. ( ) write-review | Nov 4, 2021 | This is the basic setup for Adams' novel, and the reader may be forgiven a certain sense of cynicism on approaching it. Consider it a parable, then. Or an extended metaphor for the manipulated, shaky, manufactured structure that is our world, if you wish. Adams creates a wide cast of characters here, not all of whom are what they seem, but all of whom are recognizable in one way or another as hustlers, sycophants, romantics, goldbricks, political wannabes, and fugitives in one way or another from lives as crushed and warped as the debris they dig through every day. Perceptive readers will see the holes in the story long before the characters do, but will hang on for the ride as these diggers ... ah, forgive me; I can't resist ... get to the bottom of it all. ( ) LyndaInOregon | Sep 19, 2021 |
Sean Adams’s debut, The Heap, tells the story of the literal rise and fall of Los Verticalés (“the Vert”), an architecturally unsound high-rise, nearly five hundred storeys tall, that “grew up rather than out… bustling with life and excitement,” until one day it came crashing down, covering the desert with acres and acres of “mountainous remains.” ...Every two or three chapters, we get excerpts from a book – “From the Later Years” – written by surviving residents, which details life inside the high-rise. The first thing we’re told is that the Vert, like everywhere else, is separated by class. The “haves” live in outer units with windows looking out onto the desert, while the “have-nots” reside in the inner condos, their apartments fitted with “UV screens that streamed a view of the outside world and could ‘recreate 92 percent of the window experience.”‘ Despite the social stratification, there’s a strong sense of community – a central theme of the novel – where each “floor worked like a neighbourhood, the stairwell and the elevator serving respectively as the highway and the high-speed rail, connecting distinct urban districts.” Just like Peter Thisbee built the Vert level by level, Adams adds a layer of worldbuilding with each excerpt – whether it’s an explanation of the Vert’s political structure or the establishment of a bordello in the underground carpark – that deepens our understanding of this strange, fascinating enclosed world....The Heap is a deeply weird but poignant novel about the extended family we discover amongst the rubble and ruin of a rich man’s folly. "An unpreserved Vesuvius, an overnight ruin" — that's how Sean Adams describes Los Verticalés, the fictional setting of his engrossing debut novel The Heap. Adams is not speaking figuratively. Los Verticalés, nicknamed The Vert, was once a leviathan 500-story building, erected in the American desert, that housed an entire metropolis' worth of apartments, residents and businesses. But years ago it suddenly collapsed, leaving a gargantuan pile of rubble and bodies called The Heap.... Adams' imaginative scope is staggering. The intricately wrought details of The Vert serve as the substructure of The Heap, contained in interstitial chapters that sketch a blueprint of the fallen building as a monument to modern technology as well as a chilling social experiment... The Heap is dizzying in scale, but at its heart it's an endearing and downright fun story about a man who defies all odds to reestablish a familial link that's been sundered by technology, catastrophe and commerce.... The first great science fiction novel of 2020, The Heap is sharp, acidic and sweet — and as ambitiously constructed as The Vert itself. “The Heap” is about a pile of trash that used to be a tower. There is easy symbolism to be had in the contrast between these two states — soaring aspiration pitted against the remains of demolished ambition — but the author Sean Adams is thankfully less interested in allegory than in harnessing its strange contrasts to create cutting satire....Weighing it down, however, are Adams’s efforts to fill out the novel’s world. Los Verticalés (known by residents as “the Vert”) would have been an interesting enough setting for its own book, and Adams hints at this by splicing into the narrative details of pre-collapse life in the form of a collective memoir called “The Later Years.” Written by residents fortunate enough to have been away during the tower’s destruction, “The Later Years” offers fascinating glimpses into an increasingly insular and bizarre community.... It’s engaging material, but the decision to interweave it throughout the present narrative slows down the plot without heightening suspense....Yet learning about Vert culture is essential for understanding “The Heap,” because what Adams is after is a kind of exploration of communal life.... The novel’s concern is not the instinct to form groups, but what people do within them. Its characters — Orville and his friends, as well as the villains arrayed against them — suffer because of their idiosyncratic flaws and choices. They manipulate, scheme and consolidate power. But they also care, love and sacrifice. The suggestion is of a lingering quality to human nature. Whether clustered in a vertical utopia or scavenging its collapse, people, for better or for worse — and in “The Heap” it is frequently the latter — will always act like people. When the largest and most audacious housing project in history crashes to the ground, a new culture is born, for good or bad. Adams’ debut novel is a dystopian nightmare that is metaphorical in nature but has a compelling story, a recognizable villain, and a few key characters whose personality traits make them interesting.... It’s distressing that we have so many bleak visions of the future these days but at least here people are given a chance to dig themselves out of the hole that the upper class made. A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even. Adams’s debut, set on a disaster site in a strange alternate present, is an incandescent, melancholy satire.... Excerpts from an oral history of the prior residents’ surreal life inside the tower provide a whimsically dystopian background to the main madcap plot. Fans of Borges and other inventive but piercing stories will revel in this offbeat novel.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Featured on recommended reading lists by the New York Times * New York Post * Library Journal * Thrillist * Locus * USA TODAY "The first great science fiction novel of 2020. " --NPR "As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut. . . A masterful and humane gem of a novel." --Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building's mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land. Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard--the only known survivor of the imploded city--whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show. The brothers' conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station's parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as "he" converses with Bernard. What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Già recensito in anteprima su LibraryThingIl libro di Sean Adams Heap, The è stato disponibile in LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.43)
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I've dissassembled buildings, and can't accept that people are volunteering months extracting the materials to be reused.
It might have improved the story if we had any idea of why so many residents went to live in this highrise in the middle of a desert. As it is, the story was kind of pointless, except for pointing out how rich people can always find a way to profit--no surprise there. (