Boy swallows universe

Trent Dalton

Book - 2019

Eli Bell's life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli's life is Slim--a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes--who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother. Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli's path--most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane's legendary drug dealer. But the real t...rouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom--all before starting high school. A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton's debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience.

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Subjects
Genres
Bildungsromans
Published
New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Trent Dalton (author)
Edition
First U.S. edition
Physical Description
452 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780062898104
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

HIDDEN BEHIND A sliding-glass door in a built-in wardrobe of Trent Dalton's childhood home was a secret room, and a red phone. Dalton was 6 when the space was revealed to him by one of his three brothers. Many years later, he realized this was his family's escape room. This incident is recounted as fiction in Dalton's debut novel, "Boy Swallows Universe." His three brothers are embodied in one - a mute savant named August - and Dalton's alter ego is the 12-year-old Eli Bell. The fabricated setting is the same as his biographical one: a suburb of Brisbane, the sprawling city in the eastern Australian state of Queensland. Eli's mother, like Dalton's, is a drug addict who is romantically involved with a career criminal. Lyle is a second-tier heroin dealer, which explains the escape room. (Dalton and his mother agree the book is a "50-50" mix of fact and fantasy.) Dalton is a celebrated magazine journalist in Australia, known for his lyrical prose, so it comes as a shock to learn of the sometimes brutal circumstances in which he was raised. This coming-of-age story begins in 1985 and ends a few years later with Eli's budding career as a newspaper reporter. In between, while seeking to avenge a murder, Eli infiltrates a women's prison on Christmas Day, uncovers an organized crime syndicate and falls in love with an older woman. Yet while there's plenty of action, and much of it suspenseful, this is not a straightforward crime caper. The red phone comes to play an important role: In a streak of magical realism, a mysterious voice on the other end of the receiver dispenses cryptic yet prescient advice to Eli. Somehow this device is not annoying. Eli is, in his own words, "a rolling tumbleweed of confusion and despair," and the phone is a tool by which his mind makes sense of trauma. Like all children, Eli must live with the consequences of decisions made by others. His father, who tried to drive him and August off the road when they were little boys, is largely absent, or else consumed by alcohol-fueled rage. His mother is frequently out of it. All this sounds grim. But Eli, who notices everything and speaks in a kind of hyperactive journalese, is still somehow open to the world, and frequently amusing as a result. His prized possession is an Atari games console bought from a classified ad placed by a family "who had recently purchased a Commodore 64 desktop computer and no longer needed their Atari, which they sold to us for $36." The anxieties of adolescence are persuasively conveyed - the big ones, like drug dealing, but also the more trivial ones, like talking to girls. One can't help quibbling that the story seems designed with an eye to its own presumed dramatic adaptation. (Dalton's resume includes a few screenplays.) The violence is occasionally too much. Toward the end, a plot point involving severed limbs is downright fanciful. Such florid unpleasantries feel all the more gratuitous because the most compelling aspects of "Boy Swallows Universe" come from real life. Eli's constant companion happens to be a historical figure: the legendary Australian prison escapee Arthur "Slim" Halliday, who was convicted of murdering a cabdriver in the '50 s, but always maintained his innocence. Later in life, he became a friend of the Dalton family. Early in the novel Halliday teaches the teenage Eli a lesson he will never forget: "An adult mind can take an adult man anywhere he wants to go." If that scene is even partly true to life, the reader has much to thank Slim for. In this thrilling novel, Trent Dalton takes us along for the ride. AMELIA LESTER is an Australian writer living in Japan.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Consider Eli Bell of Darra, Australia. His mother, Frankie, and her live-in boyfriend, Lyle, are heroin dealers; his brilliant, visionary brother, August, older by a year, is a selective mute who chooses not to speak; and his best friend is an elderly murderer. Eli is 12 when readers meet him; he will age to 18 through the pages of this marvelous bildungsroman, as circumstances educate him in the ways of the world, which are sometimes heartbreaking. Speaking of which, it should be noted that dealing drugs is dangerous and can make terrible things happen. When they do, Eli and August are reunited with their father, who has long been absent from their lives. Eli has a dream of becoming a journalist when he grows up and of enjoying the romantic company of a working journalist, the beautiful Caitlyn Spies. Meanwhile, the evil Tytus Broz, the Lord of Limbs, and his vile henchman, Iwan Krol, enter Eli's life, bringing with them the possibility of death. There is much more to come in this marvelously plot-rich novel, which told in Eli's first-person voice is filled with beautifully lyric prose (a fat man has legs like the faces of walruses without tusks ; the sun is a white hot god of a thing ). The characterization, too, is universally memorable, especially that of Eli and August. At one point Eli wonders if he is good. The answer is yes, every bit as good as this exceptional novel.--Michael Cart Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Dalton's splashy, stellar debut makes the typical coming-of-age novel look bland by comparison. The novel tracks bright, confused young narrator Eli as he moves through the ages of 12 to 19 in the 1980s in a seedy suburb of Brisbane. Eli's best friends are his older brother, August, an electively mute genius with premonitions of the future, and former felon Slim, his babysitter and a notorious, frequent escapee from a heavily guarded prison. Eli loves his parents, but they're a mess: his mom and step-dad deal heroin, and his dad is a depressed, panic-stricken alcoholic. The novel follows Eli as he nearly gets caught up in dealing drugs himself, discovers a secret room with a mysterious red telephone in his house, breaks into prison to wish his incarcerated mom a merry Christmas, and avenges the wrongs done to his family-all while pursuing his dream of becoming a journalist. In less adept hands, these antics might descend into whimsy, but Dalton's broadly observant eye, ability to temper pathos with humor, and thorough understanding of the mechanics of plot prevent the novel from breaking into sparkling pieces. The author shapes Eli into an appealingly credible hero capable of shaping a future for himself despite a background that doesn't bode well for him. This is an outstanding debut. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An Australian teen aspires to reassemble his broken home, bust a drug ring, and decrypt his brother's odd pronouncements.That's a lot for a 12-year-old living outside of Brisbane to take on; and this, Dalton's debut novel, also feels like a case of reach exceeding grasp. But it has the virtue of an earnest and bright narrator in Eli, who, as the story opens in 1985, is living with his mother and her boyfriend, Lyle, who are scraping out a living as small-time heroin dealers. His older brother, August, prefers to communicate by writing in the air with his finger, and his air-scribbles are generally koanlike and inscrutable: "Your end is a dead blue wren," "Boy swallows universe," and such like. The closest thing to a normal person in Eli's life is Slim, an elderly small-time criminal whose knack for prison escapes in his youth has become the stuff of legend. After a falling-out with rival dealers, Lyle is killed, mom is sent to prison, and Eli loses a finger, leaving the brothers to live unhappily with their alcoholic father. Dalton's novel is a kind of picaresque, built around comic scenes amid the grim setting, involving Eli's taking cues from Slim in the ensuing years to either break into things (such as the prison where mom is sentenced) or break out of his desultory existence by angling his way into a journalism internship, where he's determined to reveal the truth about the esteemed businessman who's also a drug kingpin. "A confident sneak can make his own magic," Eli explains. But the magical elements promised in the novel's early pages, mostly via August's non sequiturs, either get abandoned or turn out to be relatively pedantic matters of interpretation.A likable debut that trades its early high-flown ambitions for dramatic but familiar coming-of-age fare. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.