The sonic rip of a jet is ‘like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete’. It is a stunning opening and Kushner’s prose dazzles with invention. Her artistic ambition is to capture the essence of speed and the novel opens with her doing land speed trials, in order to document her tyre marks on the salt flats. He creates the Moto Valera - the bike Reno will later ride.‘The allure was partly about speed’, explains Kushner, and Reno loves speed, as a China girl, or riding motorbikes. He revolutionizes motorcycle production and the way rubber is collected to make tires (by using slave labour in the Amazon). A nearby German becomes a threat - and he uses the headlamp on his motorcycle as a weapon to kill the German. The company was started by Sandro’s grandfather - the book, in fact, starts with him on the front lines in World War I, with flamethrowers “whoosh”ing by. This irony is one way Kushner also explores the idea of what is a revolution and how does one begin? There’s an irony to Sandro’s observations: his family’s company is being targeted in the 1970s Italian worker strikes. Reno notes “Sandro said that Stanley’s work had outmoded him the way the postindustrial age was now robbing the worker of his place and that this truth made the art more powerful.” There’s Stanley who’s art installation, comprised of fluorescent tubes, was put together thanks to an algorithm. While he’s part of the crowd, he’s also one of the few who get to explore their art without worrying about money.

She also gets involved with Sandro Valera, a second generation industrialist whose family created the Moto Valera motorcycle. In New York Reno becomes part of an artistic crowd - some new and young, some old stalwarts. It’s also, of course, smack in the middle of the feminist revolution - and the book takes a look at women and their roles: as object, free spirit, participant, support, creator. It’s set in the 1970s, when Reno, the 23-year-old protagonist, heads to New York from the Midwest to pursue art – and ask the big questions in life. writer has released the much anticipated The Flamethrowers, a work likely to get a similar reaction as Telex From Cuba. Five years after that first 2008 book, the U.S.

Rachel Kushner’s first novel Telex From Cuba, created a sensation like few first novels do - and set the bar for her career very high. Delivering a follow-up to a first novel that takes the literary world by storm, winning prizes, getting rave reviews and even making it on the front page of the New York Times Book Review would, one would think, be a uniquely intimidating experience.

The flamethrowers review