A01=Lee Siegel
androgyny
Author_Lee Siegel
Category=FBA
cigars
coca cola
colonialism
conquest
conquistador
conversion
eagle springs
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
explorer
fiction
florida
fortune
fountain of youth
ghostwriter
identity
immortal
immortality
indigenous
invention
juan ponce de leon
lovers
masculinity
native americans
novelist
nuns
popcorn
queen isabelle
religion
romance
rum
seduction
sex
spain
Product details
- ISBN 9780226757056
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 11 Apr 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," begins one chapter of critically acclaimed author Lee Siegel's new novel, "Love and the Incredibly Old Man". "In the beginning," starts another. That's how low a desperate novelist will go when hired as a ghostwriter by an elderly, irascible, conquistador-costumed man claiming to be the 540-year-old Juan Ponce de Leon. The fantastic life of that legendary explorer - inventor of rum, cigars, Coca-Cola, and popcorn - is the frame for Siegel's fourth chronicle of love, lies, luck, loss, and labia.Summoned with cold hard cash and a pinch of flattery, a professor and novelist named Lee Siegel finds himself in Eagle Springs, Florida, attempting to give form to the life of the man who, contrary to popular and historical opinion, did indeed unearth the Fountain of Youth.
Spending humid days listening to the romantic ramblings of the eccentric old man and sleepless nights doubting, yet trying to craft these reminiscences into a narrative that will satisfy the literary aspirations of his subject, Siegel spins an improbable but compelling tale filled with insatiable monarchs, Native Americans, philandering cantors, deliriously passionate nuns, delicate actresses, androgynous artists, and deceptions small and large. For Ponce de Leon, and for Siegel too, centuries of conquest and colonialism, fortune and identity, are all refracted through the memories of the conquistador's lovers, each and every one of them adored "more than any other woman ever."Comic, melancholic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, "Love and the Incredibly Old Man" continues the real Lee Siegel's exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de Leon confesses has "transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between."
Lee Siegel is the author of numerous books, including Love in a Dead Language, Love and Other Games of Chance, and Who Wrote the Book of Love? As a professor of Indian religions at the University of Hawaii he has translated Sanskrit erotic poetry and has written books about love, comedy, magic, and horror in India. He also has been both a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
