The Feast of Fools - Hardcover

Morley, John David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312117868 ISBN 13: 9780312117863

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1995

Synopsis

In the tradition of writers including Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, and A. S. Byatt comes this brilliant new novel of the highest literary distinction - a work that mines the vitality and anguish of a modern city in the way that James Joyce portrayed Dublin or Victor Hugo brought the labyrinth of Paris alive. Here internationally acclaimed author John David Morley has turned his prodigious talent on present-day Munich. Exuberant, erotic, and shimmering in its display of virtuosic language, The Feast of Fools evokes the ironies, the burlesque comedies and the heartache of a city caught in the whirling frenzy of its winter carnival season. With the haunting Greek myth of Persephone ingeniously imposed as an overlay, a mesmerizing tapestry of a tale emerges.
Stephanie and Brum are pronounced man and wife in a registry office in Munich. But as the wedding party disperses Stephanie drifts off alone to the banks of Isar where she vanishes from her old life. We follow Stephanie as she abandons Brum to cavort for six months with a new lover, Max Hollman, the wealthy director of Hollman Mourning Services and a pioneer in the "modernization of death." Stephanie enters into Max's musty, isolated world, riddled with antiques and children's furniture, pressed flowers, cased butterflies and other items in which the soul has been preserved by the embalming fluid of art. A place wholly unfamiliar to Stephanie, who in her flight has deserted not only Brum but her quotidian life and her own family as well.
Morley has assembled a tantalizing cast of characters whose movements are traced through the maze of Munich during one of its cruelest winters and through one unforgettable season of love, loss, and rebirth.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Morley's extended rumination on the ways and mores of modern Munich is a broad, ambitious book that shoots for literary greatness throughout and occasionally hits the mark. Freely blending references to myth, astrology and literature, the author's fourth novel (after The Case of Thomas N.) explores the city through a sampling of its cultural elite as they plow through the seasonal ceremonies that sustain the good burghers during a tempestuous winter. While both characters and subplots abound, the central conflict revolves around a split between an artist named Brum and his wife, Stefanie, who briefly leaves him to conduct an affair with a rich, androgynous undertaker with a penchant for ladies' underwear. In addition to various other members of Stefanie's family, the roster also includes several entertaining figures connected to the Munich Evening Herald, the best of whom is Johnny Ploog, a typically cynical critic and columnist. Morley uses his characters as vehicles to offer his thoughts on culture, love, death and other weighty issues. Plot is a secondary concern for much of the novel; the narrative is divided into numerous chapters of varying styles and lengths. Some are stunningly literate and brilliant, while others are tedious or self-indulgently experimental. But as inconsistent as this novel often is, few modern novelists take the risks inherent in Morley's effort, and when he succeeds the literary sparks fly.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Using six months in Munich as background and a family of women as primary subjects, Morley (Pictures from the Water Trade, LJ 4/15/85) has created an impressive, multifaceted literary landscape. Between the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, the lives of three sisters change irrevocably: Stephanie vanishes on her wedding day, Martha's pregnancy reaches full term, and Dotty finds herself truly adored. The story is told in short pieces-dream sequences, diary entries, newspaper col-umns, mannered word play, straight narrative-in different voices and styles, overlaid with myth and influenced by astrology, astronomy, and religion. The surrealism of his earlier fiction is apparent, but here Morley is more an impressionist, illuminating eternal verities with his skilled, sometimes elegant prose. Challenging and rewarding; for serious fiction collections.
Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0312117868
• ISBN 13: 9780312117863
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 443