I Am Radar

By Reif Larsen

At the birth of Radar Radmanovic, all of the hospital electricity mysteriously fails. When the lights are turned on again, the staff is startled to see the healthy baby boy--with unusually black skin--born to the two stunned Caucasian parents.  Despite the father’s joy at the successful delivery, it is the mother, Charlene, who bears the brunt of the gossip and speculation, and who becomes overwhelmed with her need to ‘fix’ the skin color of her beloved Radar. Though Charlene has her own problems following the birth--including a newly heightened but crippling sense of smell--she receives no help from the hospital staff. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”

Just what was born in the long explosion of the Twentieth Century? In the shrapnel of propaganda and colonialism, genocide and racism, the characters of emI Am Radar hunt in the rubble for what life can still be salvaged. Following a secret society of puppeteers and scientists who perform experimental art in the midst of violent conflict, I Am Radar is a triumph of pure storytelling, a testement to the liberating powers of the imagination.

In the civil wars of Yugoslavia, two brothers walk shockingly different paths: one into the rapacious paramilitary forces terrorizing the countryside, the other into the world of avant-garde puppetry in beseiged Belgrade. In Norway during the Second World War, a group of resistance schoolteachers defy the German occupiers by stealing radioactive material from a secret Nazi nuclear reactor--to stage a dramatic art performance, with no witnesses, deep in the Arctic circle. In the years before Cambodia’s murderous Khymer Rouge regime, an expatriate French landowner adopts an abandoned native child and creates a life-long scientific experiment of his new son's education in physics. In the modern-day Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the world’s largest library--composed of perfect, interlocking hexagons hidden within the jungle--in the futile hope that the books will somehow cement a peace in the war-torn country. And through all these stories walks Radar Radmanovic, a gifted radio operator from the New Jersey Meadowlands--an epileptic with a strange past, an uncanny ability to communicate with machines, and all too ordinary white skin.

Written by acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen--the author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, soon to be a major motion picture--I Am Radar displays the same measures of charm and empathy, tragic circumstance and original dialogue for which Larsen’s last work was praised. A sophisticated but addictive reading experience that draws on the farthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and performance art, I Am Radar is a novel somehow greater than all of its parts, a breath-taking and unparalleled joyride through the worst that humanity has to offer only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780143194811

Book preview

ONE

Elizabeth, New Jersey

April 17, 1975

It was just after midnight in birthing room 4C and Dr. Sherman, the mustached obstetrician presiding over the delivery, was sweating lightly into his cotton underwear, holding out his hands like a beggar, ready to receive the imminent cranium.

Without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness.

Though he had been delivering babies for more than thirty years now, Dr. Sherman was so taken aback by this complete loss of vision that he briefly considered, and then rejected, the possibility of his own death. Desperate to get his bearings, he wheeled around, trying to locate the sans serif glow of the emergency exit sign on the stairwell across the hall, but this too had gone dark.

Doctor? the nurse called next to him.

The exit! he hissed into the darkness.

All through the hospital, a wash of panic spread over staff and patients alike as life support machines failed and surgeons were left holding beating hearts in pitch-black operating theaters. None of the backup systems—the two generators in the basement, the giant, deep-cycle batteries outside the ICU, usually so reliable in blackouts such as this one—appeared to be working. It was a catastrophe in the making. Electricity had quite simply vanished.

In birthing room 4C, Dr. Sherman was jolted into action by Charlene, the expectant mother, who gave a single, visceral cry that let everyone know, in no uncertain terms, that the baby was still coming. Maybe the baby had already come, under shroud of darkness. Dr. Sherman instinctively reached down and, sure enough, felt the conical crown of the baby’s skull emerging from his mother’s vagina. He guided this invisible head with the tips of his ten fingers, pulling, gathering, turning so that the head and neck were once again square with the baby’s shoulders, which still lingered in Charlene’s birth canal. He did this pulling, gathering, turning without seeing, with only the

Reviews for I Am Radar

[eoin-311239 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful, slightly imperfect, marvel. Similar in tone to his first book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, but magnitudes larger in scope, I Am Radar manages to build several intricate worlds and weave them together. The characters, their interests, and the sentences which build them are fascinating and seem joyfully made, a bit like Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. The quality suffers slightly by a rather abrupt end (in so far as a 650 page novel can be said to be "abrupt"). Still, there is more to love in this book than most. Worth it for nearly any character.

[kikowatzy · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In the description of "I Am Radar", it says the book is somewhat about a group of performers who stage amazing and elaborate performances in the middle of nowhere and witnessed by no one. Apparently, these performances are organized by some of the world's most talented individuals and cover a variety of topics so deep (such as quantum physics, philosophical questions on the nature of reality, etc.) that, even if seen by an audience, it would completely go over the heads of the common man. In my opinion, this is a great summary of the book itself. After all, no matter how revolutionary or insightful a performance is, you have to wonder what's the meaning if no one ever sees it. I thought the book itself was very professionally written and all the correct literary techniques are used to draw into the heads and the lives of the various characters in the story. Yet, after only a few chapters into the book, I started to wonder what the purpose of it all was. You read about someone's coming of age story and yet it seems to serves no purpose at all in the grand scheme of the book. In one of the book's supposedly revolutionary performances, puppets with TV for heads are wonderously made to dance without strings and there are mathematical equations of some universal truth that flashes on the stage in the background. Interesting, yes. But I don't get it. One of the troup's leaders defends against this very skepticism by saying that even if no one sees the performance or knows that it even existed, the universe itself sees it and this can change the world. So perhaps this book is indeed a masterpiece that only the universe and maybe even a few individuals can truly appreciate. But for most readers, I would say you can safetly live your lives happily not reading it or even ever knowing it has existed.

[mckait · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I have just closed the covers of I Am Radar: A Novel by Reif Larsen after two days of intensive reading. I'm still not sure what I read. This book takes you back and forth through time and and lives of several different focal character. At some point you learn that there have a connection or two, but Exactly the point of this story is still in question as far as I'm concerned. About halfway through, my interest was piqued, and that is what led to me dedicating another day to this substantial read. Sadly, the event did not manage to hold my interest as it might have, because the story spiraled off to another place and time.I want to say that the entire story centers on Radar Radmanovic. I honestly don't believe I can say that. There are too many twists and turns and long and very winding paths in this book. He is certainly one f the most central figures, I can say that. I can also say that I disliked his mother from very early on, and I didn't like her any better when I closed the book. What I can say, and emphatically, is that this book would have benefited from some editing. It seems as though the author felt that the more words the better, but that is not necessarily the case.Certainly, this book touches on some interesting topics, such as quantum physics, Nicola Tesla, the importance of books, history and even relationships. But they are all so strangled with words that it was difficult to stay with it. I am nothing if not determined, however. Also, I wanted to be done with it and get my life back, so I carried on. As I mentioned, I was no more enlightened about the point of this story at the end, then I was at the beginning. There are some interesting characters and the are certainly all entangled with each other and certain historic events, and imagined events as well. One star devoted to some good character development, and one for the possibilities this story held.

[lilibrarian · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Radar Racmanovic is born black to white parents. In searching for a way to "cure" Radar's problem, his parents meet a secretive group of scientists who stage performance art in war-torn countries.

[gendeg-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Back in August of 2003, when I lived on 89th Street and 3rd Avenue in NYC, I lived through and survived the blackout that plunged the entire Northeast and parts of the Midwest into total darkness and confusion. It should have been terrifying but it wasn’t. I remember the evenings hanging out in my 8th floor apartment, everything bathed in candlelight, windows flung open in the middle of the sweltering night, and thinking, “How cool is this?” Like you’re a kid again, and discover school has been cancelled for a couple days. The event was so epic and rare and full of earnest grand adventure, all one could do was go bacchanalian out of boredom and necessity: drink all the beer and vodka before it goes tepid; eat all the ice cream before it melts; find a sushi place selling hamachi and toro half off and live dangerously; take advantage of the dim light and the bright stars (look, the sky, no more light pollution!) and indulge in al fresco, au natural sleeping arrangements. Yep, good times.Anyway, my review, my digression…So this was the memory that lit up in the back of my mind as I read Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar, a 600-page epic that forms itself, like a geological phenomenon, in the primordial pool of that kind once-in-a-lifetime moment-ness. The strange moment in the novel is the birth of Radar Radmanovic in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Charlene and her Serbian immigrant husband Kermin. As Radar is born, the lights flicker and go out in the hospital. Radar is born into the arms of a doctor holding a flashlight. Stranger still, Radar is a genetic anomaly: he comes into the world with jet-black skin—a shock, no doubt, to his white parents. (Larsen doesn’t address the implied racial component of this in much detail, so don’t go looking for race politics here.)Kermin is completely chill about his son’s condition and accepts him as he is, while Charlene develops a kind of nutty crusader’s obsession with seeking a cure for her son. Kermin, an amateur tinkerer of all things electronic sees his son as special. Eventually, in her research, Charlene makes contact with a zany group of Norweigan physicist puppeteers with radical politics who claim to have an experimental treatment—something to do with electrocution (?!)—that can fix Radar’s condition. Kermin is dubious, even horrified, but eventually Charlene wins the argument, and they all fly to Norway.Cute little Radar, a toddler at this point, is eventually cured—but now has to live with the side effects. He now suffers from epilepsy and goes bald. But it seems he’s also gained something in this weird Faustian deal: an ability to read radio transmissions by touch. There was always an aura of sorts to him; now that his outer layer has been shed, he’s like an exposed wire. Poor guy.Radar’s story then frustratingly drifts to the background, and Larsen pulls the rug out from under us, steering the narrative to different places and completely different stories. From Norway, we travel back to New Jersey, but then the novel spins off into other directions. Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the other major settings in the book. Where I Am Radar excels is in how Larsen is able to fashion this kind of fantastical, slightly ridiculous premise and pull together a decent story out of it. For the most part, Larsen succeeds. But ultimately the novel just flatlines for me. Another reason, I didn’t quite warm to the book is the use of scientific minutiae that permeates its pages. Usually, minutiae is a good thing. But here it’s like Larsen is trying to be weighty by freighting the book in all this contrived, hipsterish, showy science. It distracts and clouds the narrative rather than burnishing it with complexity. In many ways, the book evokes a kind of Wes Anderson-style of storytelling, esoterically charming but also exasperating. When it works, it works, but I’m not sure it works that well here. Maybe it was the constant reference to puppetry and theatre, which casts a shadow across the book’s various storylines. Also, all the travel across the oceans to different continents seemed all so unnecessary in the end, even a little insultingly colonial and White Man’s Burden-ish.By far, I Am Radar should get points for sheer imaginative storytelling; Larsen brazenly rejects narrative conventions. But ultimately I just tired of the book long before I reached the end. I didn’t rip through this; the story drags and grows tedious in places. Larsen does a remarkable job showing off his love of research, and kudos to him for that, but it’s like he made the novel structure an afterthought, a mere modus operandi for the sake of convenience. As in Larsen’s first novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which I enjoyed, this one is full of marginalia, pictures, excerpts, footnote-type facts, but it just never really comes together and gels into a satisfying story arc. (Clocking in at 600 pages, there should be an arc, for goodness sakes!) Reading it was like observing an ice sculpture that you once marveled at momentarily at the beginning, until it all melted and dribbled away and now you have no recollection of its original form.[Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest and candid review.]

[katevane · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ambitious, inventive, interminableI am Radar begins with the story of Radar, a black boy born to white parents in New Jersey in the 1970s. His mother’s frantic search for answers to this medical mystery eventually brings her into contact with a bizarre group of scientists and performance artists in Norway. His father, traumatised by his World War Two experiences, obsessed with radio, finds they have something in common and Radar’s life changes. There is so much to admire in this book. How can you not love a story that brings together quantum physics, some of the major conflicts of the twentieth century and characters who are complex, colourful and acerbic? So why did I struggle?The writing is brilliant in places but it is also very wordy. Each time a major character is introduced, we have to plough through the backstory not only of their parents, but their grandparents too. It’s easy to lose the flow, wondering what’s important and what’s just decorative. At certain key points in the book, where the drama should be at its highest, the narrative is slowed down by weighty descriptive passages. There is a certain amount of repetition. Still, I loved the strongly drawn characters and their relationships. They all have extraordinary gifts that put them at odds with ordinary life. It’s intriguing learning about people (actually all the main characters are men, though mothers get strong supporting roles) in different periods and places, from the last days of Yugloslavia to colonial Cambodia. And there’s some fun unravelling the disputed accounts of the two authors supposedly recording the history of the group, including illustrations of apparent archive material. I found myself in a double bind – the book was too good to abandon but my heart sank a number of times when I realised how far I still had to go. Interesting but on balance I wonder if it was worth the hefty investment of hours it required.*I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The trouble with Larsen’s “I Am Radar” is that it is not a novel in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a series of linked stories or novellas lacking sufficient focus to develop one plot line or set of characters. The novel is plagued by too many digressions into unrelated things, mostly technical and scientific, which are left to hang unfinished. We see this in Charlotte’s sense of smell and mania with her library, Tesla’s experiments, the geography of the Arctic, quantum physics, radio technology, political turmoil around the world and especially puppetry. Larsen is understandably enamored with science and research, but this interrupts the flow of his novel, often serving little purpose than to distract from what may be important. There may be much of thematic significance that is easily overlooked among all of this minutia and digression. It is particularly frustrating to have intriguing items introduced and then abruptly dropped for something new.There are plot elements that seem important (e.g., Kirkensferda), especially Radar’s story, which can come into focus, but then are lost among new details. One must acknowledge that the individual stories are well written and engaging, especially the detailed backstories and the strong character development. Most of the protagonists have unusual gifts. They can be creative, complex and colorful, but also flawed in many ways. Notwithstanding this, they never gel into one coherent piece. The settings also are exotic and Larsen develops them exquisitely, including the Balkans during ethnic cleansing, colonial Southeast Asia during Khmer Rouge atrocities, the unusual environment above the Arctic Circle and the African Congo. He also manages even to give mundane New Jersey an exotic flavor (e.g., a defunct shopping mall called Xanadu). The book is well worth the time because of the stories, settings and especially the idiosyncratic characters. However, anyone expecting to find a coherent narrative here will be undoubtedly disappointed.

[c.archer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What can I say about this book. I'm glad I read it, and I'm glad that I'm done reading it. That is what usually constitutes a 3 star review for me. I really enjoyed the beginning third to half of the story. After that point, I found it to be a bit too technical and too odd for my taste. From the black-out on, things just got a bit to big in scope. I was enjoying the characters and their ability to function in their own unique setting, particularly Radar, but the second half of the story just moved way to far out for my preference. I wanted to read more about Radar and his family, and I was disappointed that the story took off on a different tangent.This book is still an amazing story. I expect that readers will be split in how they respond to it. I recommend it to people who are intrigued by science and science fiction as well as readers who appreciate quirkiness in their novels and ambiguous endings. I know they are out there and will be thrilled by this book. It just doesn't include me.Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this title.