Erased

Cleveland - land of enchantment! - is the setting for this wild ride of a novel. The writing is superb, the humor unlike anything I've read by any other writer. Makes me want to crawl into Krusoe's brain to figure out what makes it work the way it does.

absolutely fun, wry and beautifully strange. serious themes, such a light touch. erased wrapped me up in its magic before i knew what hit me, then it was over, so soon! and i just wished there were more--and there is. this is book three in mr. krusoe's resurrection trilogy. it doesn't seem like they need to be read in any order, each stands alone. i loved #1. iceland, somehow missed #2, girl factory, and i loved #3 erased. i'm going to go read girl factory right now!

Explaining the plot of a Jim Krusoe novel is like talking a friend through the hairpin turns of a marvelous, fantastical dream: halfway through you realize it's not just about what happens next, but about some mysterious and vital knowledge. ERASED explores questions that can't be answered, but that must be asked: what does it mean to cross over from life to death? How different are those two states, really? And what better way to puzzle that out than to go on a Kafkaesque rodent hunt and a deeply ironic yet fully redemptive tour of Cleveland? (Well, why not Cleveland?) I loved this book for its piercing gaze, its absurdist heart; its humorous soul. I'll read it a third time on one of those afternoons when I want to feel meditative--but also laugh.

This is a strange and fascinating book. It's a blend of magic realism and dirty realism. It's set in nitty-gritty Cleveland and the mundane realities of the hero's life are hilariously described in minute detail. He's a dealer in garden tools leading a placid life into which inexplicable events keep intruding. His mother has supposedly gone to Cleveland and drowned while fishing, but he only hears of the event from being sent a newspaper cutting. Then he starts getting postcards from her. He goes to Cleveland to solve the mystery, rents an apartment above a [...], and keeps getting false clues and meeting people who offer to help then disappear and reappear in odd ways.