From Library Journal
Durable avant-garde author Sorrentino's 1981 volume tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood through 78 tiny snippets with recurring characters. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Fiction. Re-printed by Dalkey Archive Press. Both comic and haunting, CRYSTAL VISION invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue. In a series of seventy-eight short narratives, Gilbert Sorrentino perfectly captures the speech, allusions, and confusion of The Magician, Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie, and many others. Through formal inventiveness, Sorrentino liberates these characters from the confines of realism and gives us their world--zany, vulgar, hilarious, and exuberant. "CRYSTAL VISION is a remarkable work of transparence, both artfully faceted in its construction and vital--full of speaking fossils--in the life it remembers"--Thomas LeClair, Washington Post Book World.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this collection of 78 short narratives based on the Tarrot, Sorrentino vividly captures the language and wit of Brooklyn circa 1947 as embodied by a parade of characters that gather on the local street corner to gossip, brag, insult, lust, and even occassionally critique the book itself.

The chapters align themselves into five major divisions, each with its own foundation, even though skeins from other divisions interweave this complex fabric. Perhaps the book's epigraph speaks as eloquently as anything could about the author's underlying view of his characters. It is from Dante's "Inferno" and reads, "Great grief seized me at the heart when I heard this, for I knew people of much worth who were suspended in that limbo."

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post

Sorrentino is . . . a comic anthropologist, collector of street wit, repertory routines, and some Bowery Boys antics.

Thomas LeClair— Washington Post

Saturday Review

There is in Crystal Vision enough beauty, truth, and humor to fill up several novels. . . . It is a remarkable achievement

San Francisco Chronicle

A defiant paean to the human spirit . . . a book crammed with antic invention, a marvelous mix of slapstick and the sublime

Virginia Quarterly Review

With Aberration of Starlight and now Crystal Vision, Sorrentino establishes himself as a major novelist, a cross between Studs Terkel and John Barth, whose work deserves our attention

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