The Grammar Architect

Chris Eaton
288 pages (2005); 1.2MB download
Insomniac Press; ISBN: 9781554830480

DESCRIPTION

In Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), a man is hired to restore an old church tower and falls for a woman with a disapproving father. What's worse, she also falls for the man's best friend, and the ensuing love triangle inevitably leads to her death.

Enter the literary cover! Like its musical counterpart, Eaton begins with Hardy's basics and transforms it into something entirely his own. But in Eaton's version, the man begins to believe he can erect a new tower made entirely of words. And the woman's father — a personified version of the tragedy that hangs over all Hardy novels — develops a taste for destruction and decides to stick it to everyone.

But in Eaton's magical realist version, akin to Gabriel García Márquez's work, it is the poet Burke who must try to make sense of it all, in hopes of somehow finding an explanation for his own confused life. But when the detective is more concerned with metaphorical implications than any sort of quantitative reality, does his version of the events trap them in Hardy's melodramatic consequences forever?