Scrapper

Zusatztext 91735943 Informationen zum Autor Matt Bell Klappentext For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven! Scrapper traces one man's desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit. "Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy's The Road set in present-day Motor City... powerful." -Publishers Weekly Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as "the zone!" an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he's come to steal: a kidnapped boy! crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero! Kelly secretly avenges the boy's unsolved kidnapping! a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods! Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America's greatest cities! its beautiful architecture! its lost houses! shuttered factories! boxing gyms! and storefront churches. With precise! powerful prose! it asks: What do we owe for our crimes! even those we've committed to protect the people we love? 1 When Kelly saved the boy he was not yet again living any real life, just wallowing in the aftermath of terrible error. Later he would say he'd lived that year by his hands and by his back and by his shoulders and his wrists and his legs and his knees. The year of the body, he'd say, showing his opened fists, the thick white blistering of his callusesand forget the head, never mind the heart. After the collapse began he'd barely thought, barely spoken, tried for a time to slow his thoughts to silence, or else to bury them with effort, exhaustion. He'd worked past the pains he'd known, found deeper places to lodge a throbbing, but then in the zone the incompleteness of every building became an inkblot for the subconscious. Whatever was missing would be supplied. The farther he moved toward the center of the zone the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered the cliffs of the state from off the land, shaped the dunes he'd dreamed of often after he'd left the state. The streets here were empty of traffic and in some neighborhoods the grass overran the sidewalks. He parked his truck, got out, walked the paved lanes instead. On trash days he could tell whether a house was occupied by whether or not a container appeared at the curb. There were other methods of determining inhabitation: the sound of televisions or radios, the presence of cut grass. But some men cut the grass for their neighbors to hide how they were the last ones living on their block. A way of pretending normality, despite the boarded windows, the graffiti, the other front doors never opened. Despite the absolute absence of other cars, other human voices. Mostly it was easier. Mostly there was no question where there were people left behind. The only questions he had to ask were about opportunity, risk, metal. Whenever Kelly entered an uninhabited house he understood he entered some life he might have lived, how the emptiness of every room pulled him inside out. A furnishing of the self. He opened the front door and the house ceased its stillness. If it had ever been inert it wasn't now. No structure was once it held a human consciousness. In the South Kelly had worked construction, had seen firsthand how a house unlived in wasn't a hous...

*Praise for *Scrapper

"Equal parts dystopian novel, psychological thriller, and literary fiction, [Scrapper] evokes a dark and lonely existence for its stoic protagonist . . . By the novel's end, Bell adeptly depicts Kelly as a complicated soul capable of great violence and kindness."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A fearless and harrowing meditation on the ruination and transformation of cities and of people; but amid loss and destruction, Bell finds a strain of piercing hope. This is an extraordinary book."
—Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"This haunting story is juxtaposed with Bell’s fierce lyricism, creating a stirring and noir-ish novel that reflects on the nature of emptiness, ruin and renewal."
—The Detroit Free Press

"Scrapper is a meditative, moody work of art. It's about love and violence, hope and ruin, a kind of superhero story for adults. Matt Bell is truly gifted and his latest offers more proof that he's a writer we should all be reading."
—Victor LaValle, author of *The Devil in Silver
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"I love this book . . . full of metaphorical possibilities . . . quite frankly beautiful. Does to Detroit what Bolaño does to Ciudad Juárez . . . Fantastic."
—*KTEP, *Words on a Wire

"A book of what to do with ruin and of how we attempt to salvage or redeem . . . Scrapper eventually shows Kelly to be a deeply wounded man, so much so that he nearly carries two halves inside him: the 'scrapper' and the 'salvor.' The former wants to rip the houses apart and let Detroit (and himself) burn; the latter wants to find and treasure whatever may yet be worth saving—in himself, in Detroit, in anyone."
—Star Tribune

"Bell’s fiction has been described as grisly, spooky, and dreamlike. Perhaps parts of Scrapper are each of those things, as it takes us on a journey through trauma, destruction, and hope—hope for ourselves, for others, for those who would make us afraid."
—The Rumpus

"[Scrapper] explores regret, redemption, and the cost of violence in both our private lives and on the global scale of racism, war, and industry."
—Belt Magazine

"Bell slowly teases [out] Kelly’s failures at willed amnesia in equally beautiful and painful streaks of poetic and suggestive prose . . . Stunning, timely, and ultimately illuminating."
—Rain Taxi Review of Books

"An apocalypse of the psyche."
—*American Book Review*

"Scrapper explores the apocalypse of the everyday, the world-ending moments that happen in silence and how against all odds we try to survive them and be better."
—*Puerto del Sol*

"Splendid . . . stirring . . . Bell is a brave writer . . . [and] can write like a dream."
—Bill Morris, author of Motor City Burning, for The Millions

"Matt Bell’s new novel Scrapper envisions a world as grim and primed for post mortem as any sci-fi dystopia . . . One of the most unflinchingly real and devastatingly disconcerting narratives of a hero’s acclaim imaginable . . . A punishingly effective and brutally affecting novel."
—PASTE

"[Bell is] a literary chameleon who refuses to be cast in a single mold . . . Scrapper is as much a love letter to the Detroit of old as it is a literary thriller." 
 —LitReactor

"Matt Bell describes his new novel, Scrapper, as a 'quiet book'—but it comes across with the noisy fury of righteous revenge . . . The author could’ve easily settled for a straightforward novel about the hard and dangerous life of a scrapper, but the novel takes a decidedly darker turn . . . At its core, the book is a love story intertwined with a morality tale and a reflection on how we find redemption through confronting evil."
—*Lansing City P…