Games of the Blind

by Evelin Sullivan

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880641584
• ISBN13: 9780880641586
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Fromm International
• Length: 297 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An overlooked gem

This yarn centers itself around the character and the voice of Paul Avery, a professional psychologist and convicted murderer. From the jail cell Avery tells the long story of his life beginning with unusal parents, a trip to Italy, and his failed first love at fourteen with an older married woman. He moves to Chicago and lives with his Uncle's family, where he learns sadism with his younger, chubby female cousin. The claustrophobic narrative is recalled in pleasant loops of important and detailed fragments. As a psychologist, the obsessive Avery tends to over-analyze his motives and his actions. All which tend to sound like a self-indulgent person who has never heard of stopping for perspective and compassion.Avery then leads us on a baroque joruney on the drak origins and the meaning of the murder. We never know whether we are being conned or not. We are are being manipulated to a certain extent. Sullivan adds a few theoretical interludes in this three part tragedy, which adds to the anti-academic tone of the whole book.Things get interesting as Avery meets Michelle, then has an affair with her, and devises to kill her husband. Michelle is Avery's patient. It's strange how he has a great understanding of her, but little self-awareness of himself. But this is a temporary understanding, because Avery has been a trapped man in a maze for quite a while. His killing of the wrong person, a professor, is yet another sign of his self-delusion. Avery lives in an imaginary world, but never comes to terms with society around him. A major theme of this book is the impossibility of mastery over anture: whether through technology or science. Evelin Sullivan is an important writer that needs a second look. Sullivan picks up the ball where Nabokov left it, and she projects an interesting and literate novel herself.

This is vivid and frightening tale -- a brilliant novel!

If you're like me, and you're a man, you may read this book and wonder, "How could a woman writer understand a man so well -- understand the raw, ugly, visceral feeling of being a man -- understand the wretched, petty things men do and feel?" This is a book about psychological depths, and Evelin Sullivan understands -- and writes about -- these depths astonishingly, even frighteningly, well."Games of the Blind" is a brilliant novel narrated by a truly vicious man -- a twisted monster of a man, to be sure, but it is Sullivan's weird triumph that she renders the narrator so true-to-life, so heartbreakingly human that we find ourselves sympathizing with him even as he commits the vilest of acts. It's been a while since I've read "Games of the Blind," but roughly the plot is this: When the story begins, the narrator is a sensitive, intellectual young man who falls in love with an older woman while he is on vacation with his parents. This is a formative experience, the force of which shapes the rest of his life. For some reason (do his parents die?) he is sent to live with an aunt and uncle and their fat, self-loathing daughter. He preys upon his cousin mercilessly -- sexually and emotionally -- and this is rendered even more repellent because she adores him so.We follow the narrator into adulthood, when he becomes a psychologist and becomes entranced by a female patient who stirs memories of that haunting affair he had as a teenager. This relationship leads to the book's satisfyingly shocking climax. The theory and practice of psychology are central to the book -- the narrator even includes several "theoretical interludes" in which he attempts to analyze himself and the events that overtook him. In a sense, the book becomes a profound meditation on the alienation of gifted teenagers; on the life-shattering powers of love, lust, and infatuation; on the diverse forces that blindside us, shape us, destroy us; and how "free will" can even become an empty concept if you understand the torrents of rage, sorrow, and longing that surge underneath the facade of the "self" that most of us present to others. So in addition to a story that you won't be able to put down, the book is deeply philosophical as well.I think the best thing I can say about this novel is that, of all the books I have read for pleasure and for "work" (I used to review fiction and poetry for two publications), it shook me up more than any book ever has. I was genuinely depressed for a week after reading it -- I felt I had glimpsed absolute evil in the character of the narrator, and this glimpse sent me reeling. To my way of thinking, in this age of literary fads, slick packaging and stylish posturing, such aesthetic truth is almost old-fashioned, an outdated virtue superseded by cheap, quick, well-paid productions of hacks (most "literary" writers are hacks, in my book). But Evelin Sullivan succeeds in rendering life so truthfully it leave

A Pleasant Accident

I stumbled upon this book two years ago in the public library. Waiting for my brother to check out, I just pulled it off the shelf, and it grabbed me from the first random lines I read. When I read the summary on the jacket, I checked it out and finished it in three days. Evelin Sullivan uses incredible imagery and weaves words and word combinations, metephors etc. in such a way that you have to read some sections twice, but you don't mind, because once you comprehend the story she is relaying to you, you are taken aback and in awe of her talent.I am not a professional writer, so my review is no where near as eloquent and impressive as this book, but do not let my lack of skill keep you from enjoying Ms. Sullivan's WEALTH of skill.