"The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital's electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy-with pitch-black skin-born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. "A childbirth is an explosion," the ancient physician says by way of explanation. "Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn't it?" A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen's I Am Radar begins with Radar's perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole. Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade, while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar-now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands-who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents, and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend. As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen's I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity's darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption"-- Provided by publisher.
"In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists--who stage experimental art for people suffering under war-time sieges-- Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. In the wreckage of the twentieth century, the characters of I Am Radar hunt for what life and art can still be salvaged. During the civil wars of Yugoslavia, two brothers walk shockingly different paths: one into the rapacious paramilitary forces terrorizing the countryside, the other into the surreal world of besieged Belgrade. In arctic Norway, resistance schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a secret Nazi nuclear reactor to stage a dramatic art performance, with no witnesses. In the years before Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, an expatriate French landowner adopts an abandoned native child and creates a lifelong scientific experiment of his new son's education. In the modern-day Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the world's largest library in the futile hope that the books will cement a peace in the war-torn country. All of these stories are united in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where a radio operator named Radar struggles with a horrible medical affliction, a set of hapless parents, and--only now, as an adult--all too ordinary white skin"-- Provided by publisher.
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