Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

By: Anna Moschovakis

Narrated by: Aida Reluzco

A missing laptop, a critic, a sojourn in communal living - Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis’s debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.

About the author

Anna Moschovakis’s books include They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (winner of the James Laughlin Award), and English translations of Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson. She is a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and cofounder of Bushel, a collectively run art and community space in the Catskills. This is her first novel.

Reviews

"Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions - What am I? What was I? What will I be? - in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now." (Kirkus, starred review)

"Performance art in print." (Publishers Weekly)

"A brilliant, visceral, sensual examination of the condition of being a woman, and the inherent struggles related to identity and authority that exist for all of us." (Nylon)

"Anna Moschovakis has done something remarkable." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"Moschovakis’s novel is braided and experimental, yet it looks for illumination in the plainspoken and the authentic." (Wall Street Journal)

©2018 Coffee House Press (P)2019 The Talking Book

A Masterfully Performed Work

Aida Reluzco’s reading of Anna Moschovakis’s work is masterful. She moves through the book’s extreme nuances with ease, guiding the listener across time, place, language, and identity in such a way that you would imagine that she wrote the text herself. 10/10 would recommend.

Interesting Text, Excellent Narration

This post-modern metatextual narrative by Anna Moschovakis was interesting to listen to as it was clear that the author played with the construction of the written word on the page in her book. The narrator Aida Reluzco did an excellent job of differentiating the cast of characters and their various accents to make it clear where the listener found themselves in the story. Very enjoyable audiobook experience, I highly recommend!

Mind Blown

So amazing. So beautiful. Glad I picked it. Narrator is great and the book was very complex.

Really Great

At first, I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I was pleasantly surprised and got sucked into this one. Stick with it. It's special.

Amazing Book with Beautiful Narration

I haven't heard anything like this before. Braided and experimental and top-notch voice acting. Please get this!

Tedious and pretentious

We read this in my book group so I stuck with it until the end. What a slog with some bizarre pronunciation from the reader. The coy thread about "the thing" that was never revealed was like people on social media who get all dramatic and ask you to pray for them but never give a clue about what's wrong. Had we not read it as a part of group, I would have returned it.

Not for me

Could not get in to this book at all. What a waste of a credit