Possessed by Shadows: A Novel

by Donigan Merritt

Possessed by Shadows is the story of two climbers who spend a year traveling from the rugged desert of Joshua Tree National Park to the Alps, the Himalayas, and the High Tatra mountains of Czechoslovakia.

Philosophy professor Tom Valen narrates part of their the time he spent climbing with his wife, Molly, as she fought cancer. He also explores the journal she kept during the emotional period before her death, which occurred in the weeks before the Velvet Revolution in late 1989.

Told in alternating voices as Tom relives that year, Molly's journal reveals compulsions that he never suspected, her romantic life from adolescence into adulthood, and a shocking revelation about Stefan, a fellow climber who had once saved Tom's life. In the final scene of the novel, the three old friends climb the highest mountain in the Tatras one last time, where they find a kind of redemption in the face of impending death.

Possessed by Shadows is a tribute to selfless love and the bonds of friendship forged in the extremes of high mountains. It confronts us with the ultimate philosophical since we must die, how do we choose to live?

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 2005

About the author

Henry Donigan Merritt, Jr., was born in southwest Arkansas in 1945. He has worked as a journalist, scuba diver, fishing boat captain, sailing instructor, and university professor. He holds BA and MA degrees in philosophy from Simpson College and the Claremont Graduate School, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Merritt's first novel, One Easy Piece, was published by Coward-McCann in 1981. Since then, he has published ten novels, most recently Species of Feeling, published by B&B Books in 2013. He is currently living in Mexico City.
Since completing his MFA in 1981, the same year his first novel was published, Merritt has worked since as a writer, with the exception of a six-year period teaching philosophy for a university in the provincial capital of Bratislava. He has lived in Central Europe, South Africa, Germany, Washington, DC. and southern California with his diplomat wife; they have two children and three grandchildren.

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not entirely sure how I came across this book. Goodreads has only one other review and that’s from the author, so technical no reviews, although there are some ratings. In any case, I did read this slightly short book.

This novel is told in two narratives, two halves of a married couple – Tom and Molly. Molly was just diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She is still young, mid-thirties and doesn’t want to spend her last days with treatments and hospital visits when it won’t extend her life much anyway. She wants to spend her final days doing what she’s always done, which is climbing. Her narrative is what she wrote about her life, starting not really from the beginning, but sometime as a teenager.

The other side, Tom’s narrative begins with the diagnosis in 1989 and continues forward, so we do have a split with the timeline. They decide to return to Czechoslovakia, to the Tatra Mountains. There they meet up with Tom’s good friend Štefan Borák. Molly’s good friend Saŝa was from a village near Prague, although died a while back in a climbing accident.

Climbing was in the center of the book. In fact there was a glossary in the back to define the various climbing terms, although it seemed to me that the terms were self-explanatory. In Molly’s portion went into explaining how different rocks or routes were named.

This book cannot be called a light read with so much death in the book, with a youngish person facing their own eventual death, plus her good friend, along with her father she was very close to growing up. Yet, it was marginally interesting. Maybe if I was into climbing the book would have worked for me better.

[Donigan Merritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my book. Guess I'll be fair and rate it only 5 stars.