What do You think about Toward The End Of Time (1999)?
Random musings of a grumpy and horny old white guy. Pretty mundane and boring, no, sedate is more descriptive, most of the time with some interesting bits that shed light on the state of the world in 2020 - surprisingly normal given there had been a nuclear exchange between the US and China! I suppose life in a quiet almost rural New England neighborhood could conceivably still remain untouched, with hints of decay and the breakdown of central authority here and there, from roving gangs demanding protection money, to the shadow of an abandoned space station hanging in the sky. The author flexes his intellectual muscles in writing randomly about esoteric subjects like astrophysics and Norse mythology but nothing much actually happens to the characters, only the passage of the four seasons mark the progress of the novel.
—Ryan
Toward the End of Time "is the journal of a 66-year-old man, Ben Turnbull . . . [which] reveals not only the world but the wanderings of his wits. . . . So what if he jumps from a United States in the next century, disintegrating after a war with China, to ancient Egypt, or to virtual reality? So what if characters appear and disappear like phantoms in a dream? . . . Turnbull's journal is like Walden gone haywire. . . . If Ben's ruthlessness is evenhanded, so is his alarming intelligence; it falls on every scene, person, object, and thought in the book, giving it an eerie ambiance." --The New York Times Book Review "A BOOK AIMED NOT TO RESOLVE BUT TO AROUSE A READER'S WONDER . . . Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen." --The Miami Herald "WONDERFUL RUSHES OF NEAR-MELVILLEAN PROSE . . . Toward the End of Time has a force that gets under your skin." --New York Review of Books A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
—Al
The journal of Ben Turnbull describes one year of his life, towards the end of his life, he's 66 and life contains a lot of beauty. Where is this beauty? He's a wealthy and educated man, interested in science, history and religion. The question is not about his own mortality, which becomes apparent in the pages of his journal, nor it is about the degradation of old age and the dying process. The question which is illuminated in these pages is one of the sheer beauty of life right into its death. Ben has a relish for the great show of nature, trees, flowers and women. That's the brilliance of this book, its concerned with describing beauty of life, and human civilization as life itself, one which seems to be dying, along with the book's protagonist.What's the purpose of life? And its relation to death? How can we take pleasure in it while our bodies and lives seem to be under attack from the forces of death right the way through? This book isn't just a story about a dirty old man, it's got poetry in it. There are long descriptions of sex, flowers and women, interweaved with philosophical enquiry, and spiritual questing. It's a brilliant piece of literature and worth reading more than once.
—Denis Materna
