Foregone, Russell Banks
Foregone, Russell Banks
List: $28.99 | Sale: $20.29
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Foregone
A Novel

Author: Russell Banks

Narrator: Stephen Mendel

Unabridged: 11 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ecco

Published: 03/02/2021


Synopsis

The basis for the Major Motion Picture Oh, Canada directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli.A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks "During a career stretching almost half a century, Russell Banks has published an extraordinary collection of brave, morally imperative novels. . . . In this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption." —Washington PostAt the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

About Russell Banks

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.  


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M on March 15, 2021

2.5 stars When I finish reading a book , I’m almost always sure of what I think about it, how I feel about it . I can say that I didn’t really like this book, but it’s not as simple as that. It’s the story of a pitiful man, a famed documentary film maker in the last moments of his life, dying of can......more

Goodreads review by Esil on March 15, 2021

I really liked the first part of Foregone. The story is told from the perspective of Leo, a documentary film maker, as a documentary is being made of him, as he is dying of cancer. His mind wanders. He seems intent on telling truths that no one knows but it’s not clear what is true and what he is im......more

Goodreads review by Jill on January 14, 2021

In this audacious—dare I say brilliant?—new work, Russell Banks’ character, Leo Fife—a documentary filmmaker just inches away from death—shines the spotlight on himself and what has been left unsaid. The conceit is that Fife, with days remaining in his life, allows his acolyte, Malcolm MacLeod, to re......more