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Benchere in Wonderland: A Novel, by Steven Gillis
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What is the role of art in the world? And what is the responsibility of the artist? After the death of his wife, Michael Benchere, a well-respected sculptor and once-famous architect, looks for ways to redefine the meaning of his life through the purpose of his art. Determined to create a sculpture that celebrates nothing more than the pure beauty of art, Benchere heads into the Kalahari desert where he is followed quite unexpectedly by a ragtag mix of people. Over the course of his months in the desert, Benchere must address not only the relationship of his art to the world at large, but his own relationship to the world and how our responsibilities, our loves and dreams don’t ever fade in time but, in effect, become evermore defined.
- Sales Rank: #2012723 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-08-17
- Released on: 2015-08-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Praise for Benchere in Wonderland
THE RUMPUS BOOK CLUB PICK
Plaudits are due for Gillis's brilliant fifth novel, an ambitious treatise on the role of art and the artist in modern day society. The author has an uncanny knack for depicting the best and worst of humankind... Gillis's novel carefully examines the fallibility and resolve of the artist, the myriad repercussions that art can have, and the different ramifications of political art and art created merely for the sake of art—if there can be such a thing.
Publishers Weekly
Art and the role of the artist in society meet with African politics and exploitation in this meditation on action and consequences. With Benchere’s emotional sphere in a state of flux, it becomes clear that his artistic and political views give him stability; his hardheadedness on these issues help him hold on to his sanity… Gillis also sets up a conversation about art and the artist’s role (or lack thereof) in political conversations. Should art’s influence be removed from politics—can it be? Equal parts adventure, sociopolitical critique, love story, and emotional exploration, Benchere in Wonderland is a meditation on the fact that ‘all actions have consequences,’ whether immediately predictable or not.
GENEVIEVE SHIFKE ALI, Foreword, 5 Stars
Steven Gillis has created an indelible character in Benchere and let him loose in a slyly subversive wonderland of art, violence, love, grief, greed, and grand ideals. At once magnificently strange and achingly intimate, Gillis’ novel lingers and burns long after the covers are shut.
DAWN RAFFEL, Author of The Secret Life of Objects
Steven Gillis’s latest novel once again reminds us that he is not only a master storyteller able to conjure up narrative magic, but it’s his lyrical voice throughout the narrative that’s capable of finding the poetry in the most unlikely places that makes him the 21st century heir to Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Stanley Elkin. When you mix Gillis’s sad, beaten lyricism with his continual explosions of narrative surprise, the result is a glorious, tense luminosity that makes Benchere in Wonderland his best book yet, a satisfying and deeply moving read.
RICHARD GRAYSON, Author of Winter in Brooklyn
Steven Gillis’s new novel Benchere in Wonderland is not quite like anything else I’ve ever read. Surprising, arresting, and electric, it kept me up a couple of nights in a row. This author has a voice all his own, and it’s one I won’t forget. Benchere in Wonderland is that rare thing—an original novel.
STEVE YARBROUGH, Author of The Realm of Last Chances
Steven Gillis’s latest novel, Benchere in Wonderland, takes readers into the Kalahari Desert and embroils them in the stormy clash of art and commerce, politics and aesthetics, ideas, ideals, and the chaos of the human heart. Anyone who has ever worried over the troubled relationship between art and the world will want to read this compelling novel.
ED FALCO, Author of The Family Corleone
Gillis keeps it tight, focusing on Benchere who is engagingly free of self-importance and hard not to love…Gillis also writes with economy and verve, a bit the way Benchere makes his art. This is a book with a message – and in a world where a Picasso can sell for 179 million dollars it’s a message worth thinking about – but one delivered with lightness and impeccable flair.
CATH MURPHY, LitReactor
Every now and then I get ahold of a book that makes the reading experience just a little bit more special…I loved the book. The core of Benchere in Wonderland is ideas and ideals, art and the man, and the human nature brew of shit happening, whether instigated or not, but sometimes it’s our actions that start the landslide.
LAURA J.W. RYAN Upstate Girl
This writer clearly knows how to tell a complex story, in a way no one can learn in a writing workshop….Benchere in Wonderland is a large book, a meaningful book, its story told by a masterful storyteller.
CONRAD GELLER, Lost Coast Review
Praise for The Law of Strings
This story collection hooked me from story one and continued to captivate to the end. Expert dialog and movement and resolution in each piece...This is a book you could read in a sitting or two. The pace is that swift; the stories are that good.
Stephen Dixon, two-time National Book Award finalist
Very few writers would dare explore, in a collection of stories, the intersections between quantum physics and everyday ethics, between cosmic law and domestic habit; fewer still could make those intersections so compelling and surreal and surprising, and could make the pages sing by so quickly; only Steven Gillis can provide just this bracing combination of thoughtfulness and spiked wit and deadpan finesse. The Law of Strings is a revelation—strange, barbed, and original.
Michael Griffith, author of the novels Trophy, Bibliophilia and Spikes
Praise for Walter Falls
An exceptionally well-written novel…Walter Falls is highly recommended as a powerful and moving saga of the human condition.
Midwest Book Review
Reads like a suspense thriller, causing one to talk out loud to the main character…
Altar Magazine
Praise for Temporary People
As thoroughly dark and thoroughly humane as Vonnegut's apocalyptic novels like Cat's Cradle and Galapagos, Temporary People is a suspenseful tale about history, hope, oppression, and modes of resistance. Gillis's world is richly imagined, his voice is clear, and his plot is intricate, as is his moral. In fact, this novel seems much more interested in probing and dramatizing the deep philosophical paradoxes of revolutionary thought than in providing any pat answer. Here's a fable for our time, and for just about any other time you can imagine.
Chris Bachelder, author of U.S.!
Minimalist-cum-fabulist Steven Gillis synthesizes nearly every Twentieth Century calamity from World War II to the Balkans to Desert Storm into this fable of the oppressed country Bamerita, which drifts about the seas unhinged from any continent. His idealistic and erudite hero finds his peaceful revolution thwarted and contemplates the holes in Gandhi s many aphorisms while his people are mutilated in grand spectacle on film. Temporary People is a vicious and compelling storyboard for our time.
Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman
Praise for The Consequence of Skating
Meticulous and provocative, Gillis’ tale is a sure-footed display of the heart’s ability to reclaim itself, one step at a time.
Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist
Steven Gillis possesses that rarest of gifts, the voice that seems to flow effortlessly. This guy makes it look easy. Read the first three pages of The Consequence of Skating, and if you're not hooked, go see a doctor.
Jonathan Evison, author of All About Lulu and West of Here
Praise for Giraffes
Gillis' stories are illuminatingly strange, filled with power, electric, and will stay with you long after you think you've gone to sleep.
Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby
Gillis' work is unflinchingly human, full of surprisingly familiar details. The uniqueness of his narrative lens is as undeniable as the quality of his writing.
Diane Goettel, Editor, Adirondack Review
In this uncommon collection of short stories, one of Steven Gillis' characters says: "Just not into normal, is that it?" Yeah, that's it exactly. Steven Gillis' strength and virtue as a writer is that he's just not into normal. Ellen Parker, Editor, FrGG
About the Author
Steven Gillis is the author of the novels Walter Falls, The Weight of Nothing, Temporary People, and The Consequence of Skating, along with Benchere in Wonderland (Hawthorne Books, 2015) as well as the short story collections Giraffes and The Law of Strings. A three-year member of the Ann Arbor Book Festival Board of Directors, and a finalist for the 2007 Ann Arbor News Citizen of the Year, Steve taught writing at Eastern Michigan University before founding 826michigan in 2004. Steven is now the co-founder and publisher of Dzanc Books.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Work of Art
By Kathleen Maher
Steven Gillis’ “Benchere in Wonderland” delighted me from beginning to end. I loved the exuberant, independent artist, Michael Benchere, and the half dozen characters (and a dog) that make up his family and friends. Also, I admired and enjoyed Gillis’ finesse in writing about art—and the meaning of art. He has a marvelously light touch. But perhaps ever rarer and more wonderful, I loved the way the characters’ different sensibilities toward art, philosophy, and politics were intrinsic to their personalities. Gillis shows that their awareness depends upon the individual’s sensitivity more than his or her education or culture. Conveying these traits in a way that’s playful yet sincere is an art in itself.
Through an almost seamless presentation of events and reflections going back and forth in time, the reader understands that Benchere’s need to install a massive sculpture in the Kalahari desert relates to mourning his recently deceased wife, Marti. Grieving for her, Benchere engages his faith in art (and Marti’s engineering) to proceed. He sustains his crew in Kalahari, which includes a pilot; volunteer workers; forklift operators; welders; diggers, and a young filmmaker, who’s documenting the project.
He professes that true art inspires a unique response in each individual. Art is separate from politics. But once the sculpture exists, not in the abstract but in Africa, it unavoidably becomes imbued with political significance. The artist is neither daunted nor surprised. He knew before experiencing this that art, once observed, has consequences.
When an emissary from South Sudan asks Benchere to make a sculpture for the people there, he deliberates and agrees. His presence in war-ravaged South Sudan sets off dire repercussions, from which he emerges with a greater capacity for love. “Benchere in Wonderland” is a wonderful, unique story, written in a vigorous, unique style.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Move Over, Alice
By Bernie Hafeli
If Benchere himself was asked to comment on Steven Gillis’s Benchere in Wonderland, I’m pretty sure he’d decline, preferring the novel to stand on its own and readers to draw their own conclusions. “Art for art’s sake” is Benchere’s position, at least early on in this compelling narrative, before he goes to the Kalahari Desert where his immense though highly personal sculpture takes on a life of its own.
What follows is a lively interplay involving art, politics, altruism, the social order, greed, grief, life, death, and ultimately love—in short everything it means to be human. One might be tempted to call this a novel of ideas if wasn’t so consistently entertaining.
Like Saul Bellow’s Henderson, Benchere becomes an iconic figure to native Africans. The unpredictable happens and keeps happening. And all the while Benchere’s every movement is monitored by an absurdist 21st century manifestation of Rose(ncrantz) and (Guilden)Stern, who blithely jabber away trying to ascertain his designs and motives.
And what are those designs and motives? Where does our protagonist ultimately come out after everything that happens?
Ahh, Benchere.
That would be telling. And Benchere would want readers to figure that out themselves.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Thought provoking and extremely entertaining read.
By Daniel E. Wickett
This is the fifth novel of Steve's that I've read and the seventh book overall. It's the best of his that I've read, which is saying quite a bit, especially after the last trio of Temporary People, The Consequence of Skating, and The Law of Strings.
Benchere in Wonderland seems to "simply" ask What is Art? and What is Art's role in the world? I think it goes beyond that though and pushes the reader to think about what it means to be human--what it means to think, to act, to love, to grieve, to admire.
The Benchere in question is Michael Benchere--world renowned architect, and sculpture. I don't want to spoil anything for any readers of this wonderful novel and will simply say that Benchere ends up deciding to build a huge sculpture in the Kalahari Desert in Africa and while he simply wants/hopes to do it for the sake of the sculpture, it turns into much more--a media event, a place for people to converge, to make their own comments about art and about politics and love and ...
And Gillis has infused this novel with plenty of humor and entertainment. It's a novel that will entertain you greatly while causing you to think.
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