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Contrary Motion: A Novel, by Andy Mozina
PDF Ebook Contrary Motion: A Novel, by Andy Mozina
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By turns hilarious and bittersweet, Andy Mozina’s winning debut novel introduces a charming new hero for our times: a dysfunctional, divorced family man whose passion for life comes straight from the harp.
Matthew Grzbc is a talented musician who plays the concert harp. He is a divorced dad who lives in Chicago, has a sexy girlfriend, and has a major, potentially life-changing audition with an orchestra on the horizon. At least that’s how he appears on paper. But take a closer look and a very different man starts to emerge: an obsessive, self-sabotaging Midwesterner, fumbling through his relationship with his curiously neurotic six-year-old daughter and headed for destruction in his romantic life by grasping at any remotely affectionate warm body, including that of his ex-wife. Instead of playing to sold-out concert halls, he spends his days plucking out “Send in the Clowns” at hotel brunches, and his weekends serenading the captive audience at the local hospice.
When his father dies unexpectedly (while listening to a meditation tape), Matt’s life begins to come untethered. In quick succession his ex-wife gets engaged, his girlfriend begins to pull away, and his daughter starts acting out. With his audition rapidly approaching, Matt is paralyzed by panic—why can’t he hold it together and follow his dream? And what does that even mean, if you’re not sure what it is you really want?
Funny, poignant, and thoroughly engaging, Contrary Motion is a journey deep inside a male mind as it searches—desperately—for a way to balance life, love, and a harp.
Praise for Contrary Motion
“Mozina’s finely detailed, painfully funny novel is a rollicking performance that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Mozina has created a likeable, believable main character, the sort of guy alongside whom you could easily spend hours dissecting life over a couple of beers. It’s the first novel for Mozina, . . . and it’s sure to leave readers asking for more. Mozina’s storytelling is easy and humorous, taking the stuff of everyday life and presenting it in a way that both entertains and draws out emotion.”—BookPage
“Standing between world-class harpist Matt Grzbc and his dream, a permanent position in a top orchestra, is just about everybody in his life. This brilliant debut novel zigzags across Chicago’s neighborhoods, exploring the obsession a striving artist must have for his craft, as he also makes a living and nourishes those near him, especially his eccentric and precocious six-year-old daughter. Contrary Motion is a wonderful story—beautifully written, hilarious, tortured, and filled with heavenly music.”—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award finalist American Salvage
“Charming . . . The painfully self-aware Matt has a great sense of humor, but his comic insights don’t help him much as he faces a confounding array of personal problems. . . . The pleasures of [Mozina’s] writing never flag.”—Kirkus Reviews
“No portrait of an artist brings alive vulnerability, hilarity, desperation, hipness, absurdity, and painful steadfastness as splendidly as Andy Mozina’s Contrary Motion. A dazzling, unforgettable novel.”—Mark Wisniewski, author of Watch Me Go
- Sales Rank: #754823 in Books
- Published on: 2016-03-08
- Released on: 2016-03-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .90" w x 5.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Two steps forward, one step back describes not only the complicated musical technique that gives Mozina's darkly comic first novel its title, but the progress of the narrator's life and the novel itself. Chicago-based harpist Matthew Grzbc, who ekes out a living giving private lessons and playing for brunches at the Marriott, finally has a shot at a permanent position with an orchestra in St. Louis, but the rest of his life is falling apart. His father has just died, his sweet ex-wife is involved with a guy he doesn't like, his high-strung girlfriend is on the verge of breaking up with him, and his six-year-old daughter is "an anxiety prodigy." Mozina's skewed sense of humor occasionally leads him out of the realm of realism, as in a scene where a priest's depressing homily leads a bride to flee the church, and repeated descriptions of Matt's failures in the sack are almost as excruciating for the reader as for the participants. His encounters with the hospice patients for whom he plays the harp lead to temporary moments of insight that soon fizzle out. Mozina (author of the story collection Quality Snacks) stays faithful to the notion that art rings truest at its most tense and least resolved. Readers will appreciate this wry take on a richly dysfunctional life. (Mar.)\n
Review
“[Andy] Mozina’s finely detailed, painfully funny novel is a rollicking performance that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Mozina has created a likeable, believable main character, the sort of guy alongside whom you could easily spend hours dissecting life over a couple of beers. It’s the first novel for Mozina, . . . and it’s sure to leave readers asking for more. Mozina’s storytelling is easy and humorous, taking the stuff of everyday life and presenting it in a way that both entertains and draws out emotion.”—BookPage
“Standing between world-class harpist Matt Grzbc and his dream, a permanent position in a top orchestra, is just about everybody in his life. This brilliant debut novel zigzags across Chicago’s neighborhoods, exploring the obsession a striving artist must have for his craft, as he also makes a living and nourishes those near him, especially his eccentric and precocious six-year-old daughter. Contrary Motion is a wonderful story—beautifully written, hilarious, tortured, and filled with heavenly music.”—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award finalist American Salvage
“Charming . . . The painfully self-aware Matt has a great sense of humor, but his comic insights don’t help him much as he faces a confounding array of personal problems. . . . The pleasures of [Mozina’s] writing never flag.”—Kirkus Reviews
“No portrait of an artist brings alive vulnerability, hilarity, desperation, hipness, absurdity, and painful steadfastness as splendidly as Andy Mozina’s Contrary Motion. A dazzling, unforgettable novel.”—Mark Wisniewski, author of Watch Me Go
About the Author
Andy Mozina is a professor of English at Kalamazoo College and the author of the short story collections The Women Were Leaving the Men, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Quality Snacks, which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His fiction has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Tin House and McSweeney’s. He lives in Michigan with his wife and daughter.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Smart. Funny. B
By Deborah Gang
Read this. Laugh. Appreciate. Savor.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Contrary Motions
By J. Hamby
This is one of those books about halfway through I had the realization I was enjoying it. Sounds a bit odd I know. But the writing was quite engaging and the everyday in the life of an everyman approach just hit the right spot for me at the right moment.
Matt was an interesting lead. He also is a bit frustrating and I think the mix of mundane life and almost crushing disappointments in his life probably doesn't make this everyone's read. What is more I think it might be one of those books that has to hit you just right. Right mood, right moment to be able to relax in it and just savor the simplicity of the writing style that manages to still be rich and detailed.
Mozina captures well the balance of the bitter realizations that can stack up all at once as to where one's life has gone and the struggle to figure out if somehow it can go in another direction and what it takes to make that happen. But this is more of a reflection and survival book and not some feel good all things wrapped up tidily in the end with complete and utter redemption. It starts off slightly messy, like most lives and manages to wipe up a few spots here and there even as it makes more. What lies at the heart is simply a novel about one life in a particular moment that is relatable in many ways.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The stuff of life - or Lifetime TV movies? - A good read. Funny, entertaining, moving
By Timothy J. Bazzett
When I started reading Andy Mozina's first novel, CONTRARY MOTION, I thought, Well this isn't very heavy stuff. It's more of an 'entertainment' in the romantic comedy vein. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out it deals with some pretty serious stuff, the kinda stuff that life is actually made of.
Matt Grzbc, a Chicagoan still a couple clicks south of forty, is the recently divorced father of a six year-old daughter. He's seeing another woman, but seems to be still in love with his ex. And his father, who he was never very close to, has just died. He has a congenital heart murmur which causes frequent debilitating dizzy spells, and, to top things off, he's been having some impotence issues. Oh yeah, and besides all this, his career choice is an extremely odd one. He's a harpist, and, of course, everyone knows that the harp is a 'woman's instrument.' But Matt took up the harp as a boy. I was going to say he "fell in love with the harp," but there's this rather Portnoy-esque scene involving a harp and an eighth-grade Matt, so ... Anyway, the driving force of the book, what gives it momentum, is that, after years of subsisting on makeshift jobs - playing hotel brunches, weddings and parties, and failing auditions for permanent jobs with orchestras - Matt has been invited to audition for the St. Louis Symphony, maybe his last chance. So he is practicing furiously for this, often to the detriment of his familial duties and relationships.
But that initial impression was caused by the fact that, for the first hundred pages or so, things are kinda funny, and I was often reminded of the comic-book character, Sad Sack. I chuckled, I winced, I was 'entertained.' Then Matt accepts a chance invitation to play at a hospice, where he begins to form attachments to certain patients. And that's where things become serious. I've volunteered at hospices and nursing homes myself, and so I know it's a place where you can learn something about life - and death. Matt is initially hesitant about this new gig, thinking -
"And though playing at the hospice will make me sad, it might also be a way to escape my anxieties and corrosive self-loathing ... at least it will be a step in the right moral direction."
And it is. Matt begins to try harder to sort out the welter of confusion and sadness that his life has become. After a near-fatal incident involving his daughter, and some more 'self-loathing' about his ex and his girlfriend, Matt ... Well, let me just say that, although Mozina's wry and quirky sense of humor continues to bleed through, the story does get serious. CONTRARY MOTION (the title derives from fingering techniques for harpists) is not just 'an entertainment.' It reaches toward literary fiction, and nearly gets there. Although I kept thinking, This would probably make a great Lifetime TV movie. In fact, I think that idea even showed up in the story at one point. But in the end, I was not simply entertained. I was moved - by the hospice element in particular, as well as the faltering father-daughter part. It ends up being a damn good read. Highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
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