Remedia: A Picaresque

by Michael Joyce

Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre of the picaresque novel in a mode suited to the 21st century! With a light touch and sure sense of prose rhythm, he introduces a leitmotif of randomly appearing doorways, thresholds into and out of the world, to puncture the narrative space of this engaging novel. Scenes appear within scenes as the tales unfold in true keeping with the genre that recounts a hero’s progress. The sequence of events is made to make sense by sheer deftness of Joyce’s skill as a narrator and his willingness to use the unexpected as a structuring device, as well as an excuse to delight. Making sense of the past through the telling of his tales, Joyce offers his readers a fresh experience of a classic form filled with contemporary references. — Johanna Drucker

328 pages, Paperback

Published August 21, 2018

Reviews

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The sea of memory deceives us in its placidity; wave on wave--the standard phrase--at best describes a surface succession, the blanket pulled over the restless sleeper caught in a series of dreams that, beneath, roll over each other in a roil of silt and scrub of backwash, yesterday mixed with tomorrow's yesterday, and a long-lost day that once retrieved has no name to fix it to but this current one, not today exactly but without a better name, where it spins listlessly out of place like polished driftwood, gain raised, bleached, spinning on its axis between floating and sinking as another wave washes over."