spuytenduyvil

In this transportive novel, High penetrates to the heart of fervor, the serrated need at the core of human love.

   Village Voice Literary Supplement, The Lit Parade: Our 25 Favorites of 1999

 

…accurately conveyed desire to make a novel tell the story of love and death, always and everywhere.

   Publisher’s Weekly

 

Whether it’s set during the Revolution or much later isn’t clear, nor does it really matter, for the sense of loss, rootlessness, and the horrors of war remain the same no matter what the time period. Perhaps because of the grim reality, the characters’ awareness of spirituality and humanity are heightened.

   Library Journal

 

Is it possible to translate and transpose the slippery texture of desire? For John High, it is both possible and impossible, and his own attempt at the task has resulted in the genre-bending triptych he calls The Desire Notebooks. His is a difficult, haunted, heartbreakingly lyrical book, fraught with allegory, agile at “wandering in and out of history”; it winds concentrically along parallel tracks in search of “a language of desire that outlives each desire in and of itself.”

   Rain Taxi

 

John High…..pushes prose past myth’s exploitation and across a protean inner landscape, where vision explodes on impact with the yearnings of body and soul. The story of two lovers and their passage on a train through the harsh Siberian winter, this is also the story of the Notebooks, notebooks that contain the story within a story, one that folds over – and unfolds from – a journey into the fractal of the spirit.

   Web Del Sol, Editor’s Picks, December 1999

 

John High’s expansive opus, The Desire Notebooks, pulsates with fullness and loss. It’s always startling to find yourself close to someone whose vibrant voice responds to every nuance of the breathing world, whose sentient experience is so awake that you find yourself awakened. This work roves through rituals of experience and imagination, taking us there.

   Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun

 

John High writes in a dense dreamy shorthand that manages to capture several complex worlds at once.

   Molly Giles, author of Creek Walk and Other Stories

 

A beautiful book: luminous, mysterious, hypnotic.

   Carole Maso, author of Defiance

 

It is intelligent, sensitive, and passionate writing in the tradition of Pessoa, Duras, Figes, Cortazar, Maso, and Calvino.

   Amazon.com