Synopses & Reviews
"A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."Carole Maso
Every writer is a man or woman resuscitated, brought back for a little while before being dismissed. While I was hovering in bed barely asleep, my father would sneak in to check on me. Sometimes he came in the shape of a stranger, but his black eyes with a mark of sorrow never changed. When I was younger I could run so fast my shadow would fly off me. I would leave it behind in the city where I was born. There was no city, only my mother's arms. Dear grief, hermetic as a goat's skull. The future where you are, but how to get there except waiting another year.
The narrator in Thomas Heise's adventurous novel tries to fuse together his present and past, abandonment by his parents, childhood in an orphanage, and a strong sense of disconnection from his adult life. The story is written in columnar, densely lyrical sections, looping and vertiginously dropping into the speaker's past, across several cities in Europe. W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, and Michelangelo Antonioni's films come to mind, especially L'Avventura and Red Desert. Heise's language is precise (dirigibles "no larger than a fennel seed") and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.
Thomas Heise is the author of Horror Vacui: Poems and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. He teaches at McGill University.
Review
"It's impossible to convey in a few lines the enormous pleasures of this bookthe beauty of the design, the incandescent prose, its rigor and intelligence. A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."
Carole Maso
"Thomas Heise's Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a machine of occluded and crystalline memory, performing permutations of the highest orderloss, losing, lust, lost. The books calculating engine searches and searches through its fine-toothed gears for the infinite solution to be derived when one divides one by zero. The silence between the words, between the pages is terrific."
--Michael Martone
Review
"Neither memoir, poem, nor novel, Moth is somehow all threean effusive ramble through the space of language and the language of memory. Written during a period of intensely disorienting insomnia, Heises autobiography of fever” recalls the orphanage of the authors childhood, an affair he had with a psychiatrist, and a peripatetic adulthood.... Heise seems capable of doing anything with words, and this book is a diagram of lifes internal chambers” that ventures into bleary territory hitherto thought unspeakable."
--Publishers Weekly
"With Moth; or how I came to be with you again, Thomas Heise has written a deeply moving account of loss, migration, and memory that blurs the line between poetry and prose.... Subtle turns of wit temper the book's melancholy with understated, ambivalent humor. This combination is one of Moth's many treasures."
--Montreal Review of Books
"It's impossible to convey in a few lines the enormous pleasures of this bookthe beauty of the design, the incandescent prose, its rigor and intelligence. A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."
-Carole Maso
"Thomas Heise's Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a machine of occluded and crystalline memory, performing permutations of the highest orderloss, losing, lust, lost. The books calculating engine searches and searches through its fine-toothed gears for the infinite solution to be derived when one divides one by zero. The silence between the words, between the pages is terrific."
--Michael Martone
Synopsis
A young man probes the mystery of his past, including abandonment by his parents and a childhood in an orphanage.
Synopsis
Thomas Heise's adventurous Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a densely lyrical poetic narrative. The story follows the narrators real and imagined journeys through time and space in search of his unknown mother, in flight from his unknown father, and in pursuit of his lost love. Traveling through his past, and across several cities in Europe in the present, he ruminates on the hypnotic rhythm of train travel, insomnia, desire, the nature of memory, and modern art. Moth recalls W.G. Sebald, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and especially Antonioni's films, where viewers experience a mysterious sense of washed-out beauty and trouble. Heise's language is precise and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.
About the Author
Thomas Heise is the author of Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande, 2006) and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2010). He is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University and divides his time between Montreal and New York City.