false 5 40 27 true 5780974 read 1 true 3472831 currently-reading 12 true 3472830 to-read 3 false 3472954 when-we-were-young 3 false 5339955 summer 3 false 3472967 thought-for-food 2 false 5057876 myth-and-art--generally-speaking 2 false 5583142 mythical-fiction--fantasy--and-sci- 1 false 5057881 dharma http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66051635 to: The Book of the Night (Paperback) by Rhoda Lerman
bookshelves: mythical-fiction--fantasy--and-sci-
I don’t really feel qualified to review this book because I believe it contains many allusions as well as historical material with which I am unfamiliar. However, because I have found only two other reader reviews online, both of which say very little, I feel I need to write something!
I found this book in a box on the sidewalk, a moldy hardback signed by the author, who took ten years to complete it. The first fifty pages or so were a confusing mixture of voices and descriptions given in lists and non-linear, poetic prose. This unconventional style eventually pulled together into a comprehensible plot and I found myself increasingly able to follow the meaning of the lists and alternating voices of the characters.
Two characters tell the story of a monastery on the isolated Irish island of Iona. The protagonist is a girl named Celeste who has been brought to the island by her mad father (“the hermit” to the monastic order) where he gives her a highly philosophical education in a small hut near the shore. Celeste’s father disguises her as a boy so she can live on the monastery land and, when she is old enough, banishes her to live as a novice in the monastery. The other main narrator is a monk, Generous, who is the chronicler for the monastery.

Besides the often confusing prose style, there is ambiguity about the era, a co-existence of centuries. It is the 10th century in Iona, but objects, technologies, and people of the 20th century can come to the island. Many kinds of magic and pieces of knowledge are referred to and hinted at, but either they are not meant to be fully understood, or would be only by someone more familiar with the story’s allusions and historical context.

Lerman is utterly successful in creating a place in which magic and the mundane coexist. The characters’ voices seem as if they have inherited the language of a specific and earlier place and time, while also feeling modern, abstract, and original. The story is dramatic, but much of the novel is a kind of urgent, poetic meditation on the nature of consciousness and reality, where the relationships between words reveal their true meanings and the hidden meanings of the world. At some points I found this urgent inquiry overwhelming and plodding, but overall I felt the book is wonderfully wise, funny, and poignant. It is also a love story, a story about a daughter’s longing for her father, and of the historical scission between a traditional, still partly pagan Irish Church and Rome, of a time before mysteries were lost to religious politics, and a woman could become a cow. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66154012 to: The God of Small Things (Hardcover) by Arundhati Roy
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66060747 to: Bones of the Moon (Paperback) by Jonathan Carroll
bookshelves: summer
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61458977 to: The Bloody Chamber (Paperback) by Angela Carter
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61458931 to: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (Paperback) by Christopher Moore
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61458830 The Book of Lost Things (Hardcover) by John Connolly
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61458481 The Goose Girl (The Books of Bayern, #1) by Shannon Hale
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57549806 to: The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque: A Novel (Paperback) by Jeffrey Ford
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57549488 to: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Paperback) by Jonathan Safran Foer
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