Train Can't Bring Me Home

"Very impressive, clever, brilliant even..." Liz Calder 1993. The former eastern bloc is open for business and a war is raging just over the border, but in a Hungarian campus town, a group of students and exiles escape into love and literature. Dylan, a washed up American lecturer with a Tom Waits fixation, has an affair with Erzsi, his vivacious teenage Hungarian student, and a mixed group of students and teachers spend a crazy spring falling in love with their town and each other, their affair transforming everyone around them and turning the entire town into a magical place. A postmodern campus novel that explores the limits of love, literature and language, Train Can't Bring Me Home is a dizzying, intellectual, comic, erotic clash of discourses that mimics a host of literary styles, from bad travel writing to music journalism to a relationship break-up written as a student essay, with an array of pastiches of literary greats like Joyce, Amis, BS Johnson, Calvino, Kundera, Bukowski, Burroughs, Beckett, Stoker, Nabokov, Marquez and more. "I just finished your book on the train and quietly cried my eyes out..." "Emotionally gripping... a beautiful story. If you have ever lived away from your home and felt as if you were living someone else's life, this is worth reading."


Genre: Literary Fiction