Gone Tomorrow

by Gary Indiana, Sarah Nicole Prickett Narrated by Lee Osorio

Overview

Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in a film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn't seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins. But once the fiesta is over, all that's left are ghostly memories and the narrator's insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes Dennis Cooper, "Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It's a philosophical work devised by a writer who's both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life."

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

New York, Munich and Cartagena, Colombia are the scenes of reckless decadence and excess in the early dawn of the AIDS epidemic, as recounted in this ambitious, uneven chronicle of a charismatic gay filmmaker's final years. Two friends of the late Paul Grosvener meet in New York in 1991 and discuss, over cocktails and joints, circumstances that led to his somewhat mysterious death. The narrative flashes back seven years to Cartagena, where Paul is directing a movie. Surrounded by corruption and poverty, stultified by excessive heat, drugs, liquor and sex, a motley crew of ex-Nazis, native Colombians, cosmopolitan actors and ``cinema types''--narcissists and grotesques--butt heads as they struggle to bring Paul's obscure vision to the screen. The second part of the novel recounts Paul's lover's horrible death from AIDS, Paul's own contraction of the virus, and the intrigue of his suicide. Indiana ( Horse Crazy ) frustrates the reader with his inconsistent first-person narrative. Contemplating life in the face of death he presents keen insights both through symbolism and through overt discussion; but at times his prose becomes overburdened with ostentatious mixed metaphors and almost Chandleresque similes that create an incongruous, mocking tone. Reminding us that he is not omniscient, Indiana's narrator disrupts his own story with frequent asides. Still, this is an intelligent, evocative treatment of an all too timely and difficult subject. (Mar.)

Library Journal

The first half of Indiana's new book, told in flashback, relates the pre-AIDS drug- and sex-drenched 1984 location shoot, in a vividly detailed Colombia, of a movie being made by a bunch of self-indulgent Euro-trash filmmakers. As told by one of its actors, the book details, years later, the very messy death from AIDS of director Paul's lover and finally Paul's self-willed demise. If nothing else, Indiana is daring, both in the oddly forceful convention-breaking structure of the narrative and in the horrific excesses of his mostly unlikable characters. (The mostly homosexual sex, including a coupling in front of a crematory at present-day Dachau, is easily X-rated.) However, Indiana ( Horse Crazy , LJ 5/15/89) skillfully if brutally uses this deliberate tendency to pornography as an often-moving statement about the debased quality of our brain-dead culture and the raging nihilism of AIDS. This is not a pretty picture, but it's brave and it works, often powerfully.-- David Bartholomew, NYPL

From the Publisher

Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day . . . Indiana writes with an art critic’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

“A novel too weird and perverted and frankly minacious to stay in print, too unforgettable not to be reissued.” –Sarah Nicole Prickett, from the introduction

“A disturbing, vivid, and brutal novel that succeeds in its dizzy mix of genres and influences. Not for the prudish, though.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Amazingly perverse, savagely amusing, unflinchingly serious. It may be in fact be the first really serious work of the imagination to come out of the AIDS catastrophe.” –Michael Herr, author of Dispatches

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159389176
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/26/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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