The Darkly Glamorous Menace

This new novel by the author of the critically acclaimed Profane Chronicle is destined to be belaureled for its splendor of excess and for the glory of wielding bushelfuls of wit and wisdom, words fiery and final, esoteric and obscure, crackling with sibylline meanings, and lovingly collected in a 30-page Lexicon as part of the book. Male-Female polarity is the prime focus of this outrageous and shockingly graphic novel, and it is bound to scandalize the dull and dour, all to the delight of those seeking to read the previously untold or unprintable. As a book about books and a novel within a novel, the work charts the journey of a writer driven by a relentless and ecstatic pursuit of writing the ultimate literary novel: profound, philosophical and demanding, and also quirky and ribald, an erotic romp as a lusory, chamfered challenge to seriousness. He is offering to the reader his own flow of knowledge infused with rebellion and radicalism, both of which are necessary for any art to be taken to the extreme. For only in excess can one find liberty, de Sade declared, and only by postulating the impossible does an artist achieve the possible, wrote Goethe. Art is always ahead of acquired forms of culture. Restraint, clinging to a safe world where everything is clear and self-evident is what prevents a writer from entering that zone of the exclusive extreme where his work becomes timeless. That writer is Serge, a European intellectual/sensualist. The story is told by a narrator/reader, Mac, a linguistics grad now a bookseller-an echoing, unwavering and dominant voice that neither defends nor condemns Serge the artist who has chosen "to celebrate the absurd over the chaste, the unusual over the conventional, with energy over reason..." But Mac is not really the reader, he is the reading, that which communicates with itself. Having bestowed the right to say "I" to Mac and the "He" to Serge, leaves the actual author free to vanish and be no longer tethered by convention, now freely choosing when he wants to come in, and ever so surreptitiously be the voice of this essential reading which to Serge, his protagonist, is a sacred rite, part drama and part liturgy that combines various genres and art forms throughout the novel. Just as impressionism reached its highest point in Paul Varlaine's Romances sans Paroles, so has in this novel voluptuousness reached sublime heights, brooding cynically over the tyranny of desire. Woman, with all her previous mutations, is here not a capturable butterfly but Psyche, all mystery, as mysterious as the night sky of distant stars, and all we learn of her is but to deepen the mystery. To the would-be captor she is Fate, an unconscious part of what is eternal in things; she is a weaver of illusions, the wickeder the more alluring, whose flesh is as addictive as it is dangerous, a woman who is all hot and fierce, of the devilishly fascinating ferocity of a tigress that invites a caressing touch; she is to be reverenced as is Saint Theresa for the august heat of her rapture, and he who loves her must not desire that she should love in return. There is not a page we turn without the faintest thrill of curiosity, just as there is hardly a sentence we can read without pleasure for its literary savor, its ironic elegance, furious sensuality or feverish devotion. Like the poet Milton before him, Kafallo has in an extraordinary degree the gift of assimilating all that he found, all that he borrowed, and delivers it with the force of a sledge hammer that strikes an anvil and shoots forth sparks of savage fury. Intellect and emotion are the molders of his style. In the words of Arthur Symons, the rhythm of poetry is musical, and the rhythm of prose physiological-Kafallo has ingeniously made use of both. He rejects simplicity with an elaborate and conscious search after heavily colored meanings, after that divine essence which Prometheus symbolized by fire. Irish Academic Quarterly