G.F. Michelsen

G.F. Michelsen has published 11 novels. His latest and twelfth novel, Mettle, will be available from University Press of New England in August, 2007. Those interested will find below general commentary from critics and reviewers on Mettle and other novels, as well as reviews for The Art and Practice of Explosion and Hard Bottom (University Press of New England), To Sleep with Ghosts (Bantam Doubleday Dell), and Nansen Blues (Schneekluth Verlag/Bastei Lubbe, Germany).

General

[Michelsen is] a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can’t put down all the complexities of a time and place.

—Doris Lessing, author of The Golden Notebooks

A fine, rich bouillabaisse of a book.

—New York Times Book Review

... a singularly beautifully written book, one that transcends all genre boundaries; it is a serious and major piece of fiction. At the same time it is also a crusader for fiction, for the written and printed word, encroached upon as it increasingly is by other media forms...

—Infinity.com

[Michelsen’s] story is a humdinger.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Dour, gritty and addictive.

—USA Today

A tour de force on the frontiers of the imagination.

—The Times (London)

Mettle

G.F. Michelsen knows a lot ... and his knowledge infuses this fine novel with a powerful sense of reality. Whether he's writing about a mighty ship fighting a rising sea or about the loneliness of winter on Cape Cod, he knows how to take you into his world. And whether his characters are at sea or on land, he knows that his real subject is the human heart, with all its hopes and disappointments. He's a writer's writer, and in Mettle, he's at the top of his form.

—William Martin, author of Back Bay, Harvard Yard, and The Lost Constitution, recipient of the 2005 New England Book Award for Fiction

A great love story, a murder mystery, a sea yarn to rival Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, and a powerful and elegant prose style: it's all in G. F. Michelsen's novel, Mettle. I was riveted by it from start to finish.

—Ernest Hebert, author of Spoonwood, winner of 2005 IPPY Award for Best Regional Novel in the Northeast

Mettle is a tale of a father and a son, unmoored by murder, now perilously at sea on a ship whose fate may well be as doomed as the woman neither can forget. G.F. Michelsen has long been one of my favorite writers, one whose voice—thoughtful, lyrical, and charged with moral care—is distinctly and blessedly his own.

—Thomas H. Cook, author of Edgar-winning The Chatham School Affair

Hard Bottom

Hard Bottom is a terrific novel. It shows a fisherman (a draggerman, ex-longliner) at work in the second most dangerous job in America. It shows the man’s interior—a mix of hotheaded anger, baffled loves and acute sensibilities. His mind is as various as the sea, and the sea is in him always. It is his rhythmic dream and his conscience. Reading this novel was thrilling and also disquieting. Why are such knowledgeable and hard-working people pushed to the wall? This guy is someone to root for.

—John Casey, author of Spartina

A beautifully written, impeccably crafted book ... This is a riveting tale, charged with honest emotions.

—Publishers Weekly

Michelsen's characters are vivid and down-to-earth; his prose is both potent and elegant; and his novel, grappling as it does with the issues of addiction, self-destructive anger, overdevelopment and ecological destruction, and the smothering of small businesses by large corporations, is a multi-layered story of destruction and rebirth that fuses the personal and the political.

—Booklist (starred review)

In the post-Rabbit Angstrom world of fiction, men in their thirties are good bets to screw up their own lives. The question is whether their creators are able to put a new twist on the mess. Michelsen sets his new novel on Cape Cod and, like John Casey in his wonderful Spartina, puts to good use a lot of his understanding of boats and fishing as well as excerpts from fictional police reports and ecology texts. The story focuses on the fisherman Ollie Cahoon, whose life is falling apart. He is unable to maintain a livelihood, his wife has asked him to leave, and he has caused his brother-in-law's paralysis by hiring him on when his mate leaves for better work. Most of the townspeople of Chatham hate him because he refuses to sell water rights to a real estate development that will bring new jobs. He finally decides to sell but finds that the bank has already foreclosed, and he angrily takes matters into his own hands. This is a solid tale of a man whose self-destructiveness comes together with external circumstances to form a perfect, and perfectly devastating, partnership. Recommended.

—Library Journal

Michelsen conjures an edgy, hard-luck lyricism in these pages. Harsh nature sharpens the contours of character, raising the stakes on moral conflict and upping the pay-off of resolution. Hard Bottom is a tense, gratifying read.

—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies

Whenever readers and critics decide to pay attention, they’ll find themselves comparing the tight resonant prose and weatherbeaten Yankee citizenry of Michelsen’s Hard Bottom to the work of Russell Banks. The great challenge of the sea, and the slow-building but more devastating storm of change, have been the premise of many a bestseller, and Michelsen’s novel charts a tenacious course through these literary waters.

—Bob Shacochis, author of National Book Award winner Easy in the Islands

Hard Bottom tells that old American story of the solitary struggler, but this version is new, and it is dazzling. Michelsen climbs right into the skin of Ollie Cahoon, failing commercial fisherman, and makes his pain utterly believable. This is a pain that matters, not just to Ollie Cahoon but to anybody who cares about struggling to maintain a soul in a corporate age. The story’s told in a language that is precise, tough and—when it comes to the sea—magical. A fine, important novel.

—Valerie Sayers, author of Brain Fever

The Art and Practice of Explosion

A Hungarian neuropsychiatrist, a French marine archaeologist, and an American aid worker-cum-gunrunner find themselves caught up in a minor revolutionary incident in a small Central American nation. After ten days of captivity and a mysterious act of betrayal that led to the capture of the Indian revolutionary, they develop a special camaraderie. Twelve years later, a chance meeting in a Paris restaurant reunites them. They decide to take a holiday weekend in Alsace, going by slow train to enjoy the countryside and catch up on the past, not realizing that the past is about to catch up with them in cataclysmic fashion. Within the context of this basic framework, Michelsen (creative writing, NYU; To Sleep with Ghosts) explores how history, choice, and chance shape our lives and how we create our own stories in an attempt to make sense of it all. Central to his premise is Duns Scotus's belief that "all causes must exist at the same time as the events they triggered." While the basic plot is one that would attract the mystery and thriller crowd (particularly with our current concern about terrorism), it is, in the end, a rather sophisticated work best suited to serious readers.

—Library Journal

A dense tapestry of memory engulfs and all but smothers the three enigmatic protagonists of Michelsen’s demanding third (after Hard Bottom, 2001, etc.). The story begins ominously with the image of a wrecked train, then shifts to Paris, where a weekend trip to the countryside of Alsace is undertaken by old acquaintances Eva Koszegfalvi (a Hungarian research psychiatrist), Ludovic Rohan (a marine archeologist turned underwater cinematographer), and American Frank Duggan (international aid worker, arms smuggler, and now teacher specializing in "the politics of aid and development"). The trio had met 12 years earlier, when they were held hostage by native Indians rebelling against the corrupt government of the Central American republic of Xelaju (which seems to be more or less Mexico). Michelsen juxtaposes the progress of their (somewhat wary) reunion with detailed flashbacks from each one’s point of view. Frank’s stunted amorality is revealed as an offshoot of his disillusioning involvement with Rhode Island labor and political corruption and his initially idealistic collusion with guerrilla warfare. "Ludo’s" passion for diving and salvaging ironically expresses grief for his dead sister and for missed romantic opportunities. And Eva’s professional investigations into the phenomenon of memory are compromised by constantly resurfacing shards of her family’s history of wartime suffering and signs of her own vulnerability and mortality. The narrative’s backward and forward plunges are both involving and baffling, but Michelsen makes all the necessary linkages, and deepens the novel’s texture impressively with vignettes of WWI battlefield experiences of Ludo’s fallen great-grandfather andthematically telling excerpts from the work of suicidal Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef. The potent theme of both the permanence and the elusiveness of what is past but not gone is also provocatively linked to the thought of medieval theologian John Duns Scotus. An unusual tale, a bit reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry. Initially forbidding, ultimately very rewarding indeed.

—Kirkus Reviews

To Sleep With Ghosts

Michelsen’s political analysis could hardly be more eloquently and effectively translated into fiction.

—Atlantic Monthly

A powerful first novel ... that draws memorably on the continent’s story-telling tradition. Highly recommended.

—Library Journal

Michelsen is a writer to watch. —Kirkus Reviews

Michelsen’s intriguing tale succeeds on many levels: mystery, social and political commentary and pure adventure. In colorful and descriptive prose highlighted with humor he portrays a complex clash of cultures and generations culminating in one man’s political epiphany. The story is set in Mutara Old Harbor, “A fourth-rate port on the lower eastern coast of Africa,” and is narrated by Samuel Kimbu, the assistant chief inspector of customs. But there is no chief inspector nor any plans to hire one—if any wrongdoing should be detected Kimbu knows he will be the fall guy ... In this apocalyptic tale of an Africa torn between its cultural heritage and Western perversions, storytelling becomes the instrument of redemption, with Kimbu’s “mad” father’s obsession with folktales and legends symbolizing an embattled tradition and Kimbu’s own first-person narration representing his attempt to remake history. In a moving denouement he is forced to make an ethical decision—one of life or death.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Nansen’s Blues

The language is powerful ... the peril of foundering in the Molochian city is depicted as realistically as the world of the homeless, in which (the protagonist) ends up.

—Frankfurter Allgemeine

(Michelsen’s) novel is so expertly constructed, his descriptions are so three-dimensional, that there would be little fantasy involved in prophesizing for this writer a brilliant international career.

—Darmstadter Echo

An important, emotional, but never whiny novel ... and one of the most personally stirring that I have ever read.

—Dandelion Magazine