{"product_id":"9780982987841","title":"The End Of The 19th Century","description":"Larsen stretches conventional fiction's reach with this story of a character whose childhood and coming-of-age consist of his gradual internalizing of history-as he puts it, his coming to understand \"the mysteries of space and time.\" At first, he sees only glimpses of life-through the briefly-opened \"windows\" of eyesight in early childhood. Later on, everything begins serving as windows into the past-objects, locations, landscapes, the town he's born in, the people in it-even his aging great-aunts Marie and Lutie, whose origins are back in the 19th century. \u003cp\u003eThrough small things like a visit from his great-aunts one afternoon in 1944 (when he's four years old), a blimp cruising overhead in 1946, goldfish hovering beneath the surface of a pond, the sound of a train whistle in the night, Malcolm Reiner comes to understand that things can be related \"horizontally,\" then also \"vertically\"-relationships that, when combined with the element of time itself, reveal history-that is, as life, followed by the absence of life-to be a web of such intricate complexity that it can't ever be understood. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd yet Reiner dedicates his life to exactly this \"study of the mysteries of space and time.\" In his \"studies\" he finds a sweep of time includes the history of West Tree, Minnesota; of the \"Epoch of Walking\"; and of his own \"years of perfect seeing,\" the period when, living on a farm outside West Tree, he's able, with a poetic vividness rare in fiction, to sense and see what America once was.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"THE OLIVER ARTS AND OPEN PRESS","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47013822857456,"sku":"9780982987841","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780982987841_p0.jpg?v=1763879590","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780982987841","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}