Moth; Or How I Came to Be with You Again

Thomas Heise's adventurous Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a densely lyrical poetic narrative. The story follows the narrator's real and imagined journeys through time and space in search of his unknown mother, in flight from his unknown father, and in pursuit of his lost love. Traveling through his past, and across several cities in Europe in the present, he ruminates on the hypnotic rhythm of train travel, insomnia, desire, the nature of memory, and modern art. Moth recalls W.G. Sebald, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and especially Antonioni's films, where viewers experience a mysterious sense of washed-out beauty and trouble. Heise's language is precise and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.