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Loading... The Horned Man (2002)by James Lasdun
None. 1   SqueakyChu | Jun 21, 2011 |  Laurence Miller, an Englishman teaching gender studies at a college in New York, becomes obsessed by Bogomil Trumilcik, a Bulgarian immigrant and former lecturer at the college. Miller is convinced that Trumilcik is spying on him, sleeping in his office in the gap between two desks that have been pushed together and trying to frame him for murder. Not really to my taste, but I carried on with it as it was less than 200 pages long and I was kind of intrigued to find out what happened. I'm just not keen on first person stories told by someone whose view of events is so skewed from reality. You know almost from the beginning that Laurence is deluded. Anyone in a normal state of mind who really believed that someone was breaking into his office at night would at the very least have separated the desks, removed all items left behind by previous occupants of the room, arranged to have the locks changed and requested that campus security keep a close eye on his office. (  ) isabelx | Mar 16, 2011 | Lasdun's style is a bit Nabakov (with fewer verbal games) and a bit Ishiguro (but less obscure). The tale is absorbing. Highly recommended. (  ) slickdpdx | Nov 9, 2008 | This was one of those books that I just didn't want to put down. It caught my attention, drew me in, and was snared in its trap. I've never read anything like it--strange in a new way. Will definitely reread this one . (  )1 Nickelini | Jun 19, 2008 | This is a strange and difficult book, which enraptured me and alienated me by turns. The narrator is unreliable from the start and the game is to piece together what is really happening as he lurches from disaster to disaster, subject to paranoia and moments of hallucinatory dread. Lawrence is a lecturer at a small New York college with a seat on the Sexual Harassment Committee and an uneasy relationship with many of his colleagues. His wife has left him and he may or may not have made advances to another colleague and/or a student who keeps leaving him essays which he never reads. The action moves between his apartment, the college and his department office, a room he inherited from a female lecturer who has been murdered. He suspects another colleague – sacked in disgrace for sleeping with students - of haunting his life, even sleeping in his office, and lying in wait for him. If that isn’t complicated enough, throw in a disappearing murder weapon, the theft of a neighbour’s glass eye, a hostile relationship with his analyst, a period of cross-dressing in the clothes of his murdered predecessor, and a nightmare penchant for migraines – and you have one of the weirdest and most engrossing mysteries I for one have ever come across. Written in beautifully concise and lucid prose (Lasdun is a well-established poet), nevertheless the reader cannot expect any neatly tied plot lines or satisfactory arrests. This is a condition of life novel, not a murder mystery, more Kafka than Chandler. Moving, funny, violent and – in the end – terrifying, this book is quite unlike anything I have ever read before. ( )3 Eily | Apr 2, 2007 | no reviews | add a review
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Wikipedia in English
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The story begins with an English expatriot professor of gender studies who was asked to be part of a team determining sexual harassment at the college which employs him. He is newly separated from his wife but is determined to have her back. Spending time in his office, he gets the feeling that someone is out to get him, but does not understand why, although he has an idea who it might be.
For a while, I was intrigued by the story, but as it got more involved, I felt sort of left by the wayside. When it evolved into the surreal, I was almost near the end. Oddly, I found that reading the story itself was entertaining, but trying to understand it was not. (