BeWrite Books announce the release of Howard Waldman's latest novel The Seventh Candidate
Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heartrending tragedy … and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map.
[USPRwire, Thu Mar 29 2007] In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from underground railway advertising hoardings.
It's during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through Ideal Poster's grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate - the seventh - fighting for life in hospital.
Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer's clean-up campaign.
Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea - each driven by pity, love and stark fear - the mysterious 7th Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad.
Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heartrending tragedy … and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map.
'Too close for comfort' because Waldman - a New Yorker now living in Paris - has based the fiction on fact he's already come face to face with.
Although the period and country remain unspecified in The Seventh Candidate, he said: "I'm personally and closely acquainted with two societies -- the America of half a century ago and, since then, France. The book reflects experience of both.
"Lorz's society is closer to Paris than to my faded memories of New York. The events at the beginning of the novel were loosely inspired by the Paris student revolt of May-June 1968. (I even participated in the movement). The 'Central Mountains' where the final chapter of the novel is set is the Massif Central, where we have a house. Some of the subway station names, even, come directly from the Paris network; National Library, for example. Finally, it was in the Paris subway (the Montparnasse station) that I once saw an immensely tall, thin man with the face of a fanatic, effacing obscenities from a poster. The memory stuck and inspired the plot of the novel.
"But I couldn't set the action in France, first because my potential readers are English-speaking and would have felt estranged having to identify with a French protagonist. I couldn't set the action in the United States because I have nothing valid to say about a contemporary American society I've lost contact with. Moreover, unlike France, American history doesn't yet offer parallels with the society I describe.
"This last point is fundamental, I think. I didn't want to be constricted by obliged fidelity to historical fact. The society described in a novel set in a specific time and place can't be at variance with the society the reader is familiar with. Wells had to place The War of the Worlds implicitly in a near future for the simple reason that the reader knew that no such Martian invasion had taken place. Similarly, although on a less spectacular scale than the destruction of civilisation, no one has ever seen or heard of a company devoted to the effacement of obscene graffiti from subway posters. So for all those reasons the novel had to take place in an unspecified time and place.
"Still, elements of the social crisis of contemporary countries will, I hope be familiar, to my readers: the obsessive presence of advertising and sexuality, urban blight, violence, the decay of the countryside, the undermining of traditional values, the isolation of the individual, the portrait I attempt of an authoritarian personality, symbolically driven underground, at odds with the hedonistic values of his society."
Waldman adds: "7th Candidate was the hardest of the novels to do, a source of no end of sweat and discouragement. I revamped it three times and the final version bears little resemblance to the initial one.
"I had to create an imaginary society on the brink of chaos, invent the techniques of grafitti removal, etc. The seventh candidate character was as delicate to handle as Frankenstein's monster because, unconsciously, Lorz programs the boy for eradication of disorder, including eradication of the individuals who embody that disorder, and all this complexity had to be conveyed indirectly instead of baldly stated."
Now a full-time author of novels and short fiction, Waldman taught American Literature at a Paris university and European Literature at a US University.
His previous novels are Back There (2005) and Time Travail (2006). The newly released 7th Candidate is to be followed later this year by release of his Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die. They are published by BeWrite Books and can be bought from all major online bookstores or ordered from local high street retailers. Each of his novels is covered by an eBook version for those who prefer their reading on screen.
Title: The Seventh Candidate
Author: Howard Waldman
Print ISBN: 978-1-905202-50-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-51-5
Page count: 324
Release Date: 29th March 2007
Distributors: Bertram Books, Gardners, Baker & Taylor, Ingrams
For further information and review copies, please contact: Cait Myers at BeWrite Books www.bewrite.net
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