Reseña del libro "Like Going Home: The Quartet (en Inglés)"
Like Going Home is an epic novel about coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, by one of the greatest undiscovered writers of that era, William Francis ("Wild Bill") Mudon of South Dakota and Denver. It was his first major work and has never before been published. Properly speaking, Like Going Home is a quartet of novellas, each published separately as a series of e--books and collected here for the complete printed edition. The first, "The Summer of Ballads (1966)," set in rural South Dakota, is a searing look at ranching and small town life as frontier values collide with the antiwar movement and the determination of one of Pierre's best and brightest sons, Zeno, to become a conscientious objector. Based on his own experiences growing up on the prairie, Mudon's characters are sharply drawn, deeply felt, and so vividly described that "you can just taste that dusty wind blowing in Zeno's face," as one reader put it. The second, "The Summer of Songs of Peace and Love (1967)," follows Zeno on his CO service to California, where he meets his lover Robin and encounters the sex, drugs, hippies and motorcycle gangs then running rampant. The third, "The Summer of the Opera of Death (1968)," finds a long-haired Zeno back at home and at odds with his family in a time of assassinations and riots, mourning his dying father, and planning for the ominous Chicago Democratic Convention that year. In the final novella of the quartet, "The Summer of Unfinished Symphony of Meaning (1969)," Zeno has become politically exhausted and retreated to a hermetic life in the Arizona desert, searching for spiritual epiphanies. Around the time of Woodstock, he is smuggling drugs to New York, playing in a band called "Dog Shit," and pondering the ambiguous prospects of coming full circle back to South Dakota. The publication of this book was made possible by a small group of friends who have long felt that Mudon never got the recognition he deserved while alive. He died in June, 2014, knowing that at least this taste of his canon will survive in the cloud forever.
