Stormy Nights Reviewing & Bloggin': Uriel Through Eleanor

Unlike any memoir you've ever read.

As absurd as it is devastating.

A literal tug of war between competing and compelling versions of the truth.

Uriel Through Eleanor

by Brian Prousky

Genre: Historical Fiction

Uriel “Uri” Katz, World War Two veteran, concentration camp liberator, devout atheist, contrarian, cynic and lifelong bachelor, places an ad in a newspaper seeking a “typist” to assist him in writing his memoir and receives only one reply, from a woman, named Eleanor, who negotiates a deal with him that includes room and board.

Within days of her arrival, Eleanor begins inserting herself into Uri’s story. So much so that she eventually becomes one of its main characters. And while Uri is dismayed and, at times, exasperated by this turn of events, he’s also grown accustomed to Eleanor’s company and cooking, and, as such, begrudgingly puts up with the semi-appropriation of his memoir.

Though what remains imperceptible to Uri—until the novel’s final, thrilling pages—is that Eleanor's appearance in his life wasn't coincidental; it was manufactured by her. And that the two have been intricately linked since the day he marched into the concentration camp.

Brian Prousky’s dazzling new book is memoir-writing turned on its head. It’s a story about storytelling itself. About the power of language to shape and misshape history. And about the equal perils of sharing and not sharing deep-held secrets.

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Brian Prousky spent most of his life as two distinct people. The first held a day job and raised a family and was public and sociable. The second ruminated over sentences and wrote books in secret and dreamed of a living a literary life. They shared little in common, mostly their obsessions: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, tennis and hockey.

Somehow, summoning up a kind of courage or resolve he’d assumed was absent from his DNA, the first Brian Prousky left his day job, revealed his secret and dedicated himself full-time to writing. And the two Brian Prouskys became one. Now the author of five novels, a collection of short stories and two books of poetry, he lives and works in Toronto, where most of his characters, who struggle with secret and often conflicted lives of their own, and who never quite fit in, do as well.

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