"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track,
to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something
true about the geography of time."--William Gass, The New York Times
"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the
journals of Columbus and molecular biology--all folded into a
hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths
through the American century."--Publishers Weekly
"Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings
an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of
analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in
its imagination."--Robert Creeley
"A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and
powerful. I know of nothing like it."--Howard Zinn
First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden
of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his
signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the
site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his
myth; and between two brothers--one, an MD who refuses to practice; the
other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer,
that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song.
Paul Metcalf (1917-99) was an American writer and the great-grandson
of Herman Melville. His three volume Collected Works were published by
Coffee House Press in 1996.
