Sleeping in Flame
- Book Review,
by Jonathan Carroll
From Publishers Weekly
In this farfetched story of reincarnation among the beautiful people, actor Walker Easterling, living in Vienna with sculptor/ex-model Maris York, stumbles upon traces of his previous lives. In Los Angeles to make a horror flick, Westerling undergoes a Castaneda-like training with Venasque, a shaman. He discovers that in one former lifetime he was the son of a cruel, overpossessive German midget with magical powers who pushed him out a window to his death. When Maris conceives, Walker, who was raised as an orphan in Atlanta, must resolve the conflicts of his past lives, or lose his fiancee and their unborn child. Dreams, prophetic visions and the sighting of a purple sea serpent propel his quest, in which the Rumpelstiltskin tale of the Brothers Grimm figures prominently. In what begins as a highly literate parapsychological puzzler, Carroll ( Bones of the Moon ) shifts gears into fantasy and fairy tale, with results that may not be wholly satisfactory to fans of any one genre. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Carl Bromley, The Nation
"Carroll is a magic realist who plunders our unconscious for profound emotional truths."
Review
"Carroll is a magic realist who plunders our unconscious for profound emotional truths."
Book Description
Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre-he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past-so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.
At once lyrical, frightening, funny, and sexy, Sleeping in Flame is a spellbinding tale where reality and fantasy merge in astonishing convolutions of magic and suspense. It confirms that Jonathan Carroll is one of the very few novelists who-by constantly surprising us-give us an entirely new perspective on our world. It is no wonder that he is generally considered to be the most original and provocative novelist of his generation.
About the Author
JONATHAN CARROLL is the globally-praised author of The Land of Laughs and The Wooden Sea.
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