Synopses & Reviews
The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky—director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature.There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels—praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel García Márquez—have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now.
Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskys’ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowsky’s book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions.
Review
"Jodorowsky is today’s true Renaissance man—a master of many mediums that all point directly towards a towering and imaginative vision replete with profound insights into the real by way of the surreal. The stories told in Where the Bird Sings Best contain deep moral lessons, giving his mythic immigration story the feel of a modern day Sefer-ha-Aggadah—the classic collection of Jewish folktales. This long-awaited and brilliantly evocative translation is a must read—frightening, hilarious, outrageous, touching, and (as is always with Jodorowsky’s work) filled with a deep core of mystic truth."
Review
“No one alive today, anywhere, has been able to demonstrate the sheer possibilities of artistic invention — and in so many disciplines — as powerfully as Alejandro Jodorowsky.… Where the Bird Sings Best... is his magnum opus, a fantastical something that in many ways mirrors the author himself: It is brilliant, mad, unpredictable.”
Review
“Wildly inventive.… Jodorowsky’s masterpiece.... As the drama unfolds, the reader’s response veers from incredulity to awe, from doubt to delight. The momentum holds for the length of the novel as a cavalcade of outsized characters careen across the page in a frenzy that seems for once an adequate and just representation of the living fury that is history.”
Review
“Sober, dressed, and with all the lights on, I ripped through Where the Bird Sings Best — the first of Jodorowsky’s many novels to appear in English translation — in just a few enraptured days. The trick is to eschew caricature and give yourself over to the experience, at which point the wondrous strange takes over. The mind — and, god help me, the spirit — finds itself traveling in realms it could not have otherwise explored, or even dreamed exist.…Where the Bird Sings Best is electrifying.”
Review
“This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque....It weaves together Jewish philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers, Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who follows the family from the Old World to the New.”
Review
“A sweeping tale of personal, philosophical, and political struggles. It’s an immigrant’s story of Fellini-esque proportions….For the self-proclaimed atheist mystic, the sacraments are memory, dreams, family, wisdom, the grotesque, and the reinvention of the self.”
Review
“Alejandro Jodorowsky [is] a superb novelist. Where the Bird Sings Best [is a] gloriously readable, fantastical autobiographical novel…. [A] deliciously far-fetched, multigenerational saga.... One outrageous set piece follows another with an exhilarating density of imagination as Jodorowsky juggles the tale within tale with Arabian Nights agility.… Exuberant, unrelentingly creative in its folkloric style of heightened reality... he expertly harnesses boldly surreal images to capture the gorgeous, brutal essence of life.”
Review
“Each paragraph pulsates, threatens to burst from its burgeoning body of details. Jodorowsky relieves pressure as necessary. But time after time, he proceeds to build up and dazzle all over again..... Each individual section is endowed with Jodorowksy’s full vitality.”
Review
"Gorgeous prose, imagination and a kaleidoscopic narrative style make for an altogether satisfying reading experience, one that is both joyous and unnerving at the same time. Read this if you liked Jodorowsky's films, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian?."
Synopsis
The visionary autobiographical novel from a legend of cinema, theatre, comics, the Tarot, and Latin-American literature: Alejandro Jodorowsky.
The first major novel to appear in English from Alejandro Jodorowsky, the celebrated auteur behind films such as El Topo and The Holy Mountain, reimagines the saga of his Ukrainian-Jewish family's exodus to Chile. With indelible characters both mythical and real—bee-covered specters, women who commune with wolves, militant anarchists, and holy-mystics—Where the Bird Sings Best is a mordantly funny, erotic fantasy that magnifies the classic immigrant story to mythic proportions.
About the Author
Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Tocopilla, Chile. From an early age, he became interested in mime and theater; at the age of 23, he left for Paris to pursue the arts, and has lived there ever since. A friend and companion of Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he founded the Panic movement and has directed several classic films of this style, including The Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre. A mime artist, specialist in the art of tarot, and prolific author, he has written novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and over thirty successful comic books, working with such highly regarded comic book artists as Moebius and Bess. Restless Books will be publishing three of Jodorowsky's best-known books for the first time in English: Donde mejor canta un pájaro (Where the Bird Sings Best), El niño del jueves negro (The Son of Black Thursday), and Albina y los hombres perro (Albina and the Dog Men).Alfred MacAdam is professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, and Jorge Volpi among others. He recently published an essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in the Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.