The Glass Mountain: A Novel - Hardcover

Wolf, Leonard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879514981 ISBN 13: 9780879514983

Publisher: Overlook Books, 1993

Synopsis

"An intensely imagined world superbly crafted in terse, bold, musical language."―Publishers Weekly

"A man in his daughter's bed is a link out of the human chain, " broods the King, a father who has irrevocably crossed the age-old boundary between parent and child.

Brilliantly imagined and deftly executed, this provocative literary fable of lust and obsession is the tale of two sets of brothers, one of each pair blessed with beauty and grace and the other physically cursed: two mothers, one an icy queen of a frozen kingdom and the other obsessed with her thousands of birds; two riddles spun by a mysterious Persian; and Amalasuntha, the Princess whose father has placed her on top of a glass mountain to protect her from the lust of men, including his own.

A taut and feverish tale of Oedipal tension and transformation that reverberates with the power of myth and folklore, The Glass Mountain is an astounding allegory for our time.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

The Polish fairy tale ``The Glass Mountain'' appeared in Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book (1894) and more recently was given a mordant urban twist by Donald Barthelme in a short 1970 piece (same title). Here, Wolf (author of works on Bluebeard and Dracula) uses the traditional form to write about unhappy royal families and father/daughter incest. Two princes, Fat Klaus and Harelip Fritz, are alone atop a desolate tower, the last exhausted rivals for the beautiful Princess Amalasuntha, prisoner (or ex-prisoner?) of the Glass Mountain. Both men have survived handsome, dashing brothers who treated them with contempt during the long quest for the Princess. Nor were their widowed mothers much better. All Klaus got from his was hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, while Fritz's gave all her love to her vast bird collection. As for Amalasuntha, at 14 she allowed her father to become her lover; the relationship ended when the Witch of the Wood urged the King to give his daughter up ``to all other men.'' So he had the Glass Mountain built, and hundreds of suitors died trying to retrieve Amalasuntha from its peak. The stories of Klaus, Fritz, and the Princess twine like serpents as the questions multiply. Is Fritz's claim that he has already rescued Amalasuntha a lie? How come Klaus knows Fritz's story by heart? Could the two men be different parts of one misshapen whole, as the ending (still on that tower) suggests? What the reader sees is less fusion than confusion. Wolf's ease with the genre (which allows us to savor his crisp reenactment of stock fairy-tale scenes) falls short of an ability to integrate its ancient symbols with the angst of his alienated royals. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The narrator, Prince Fat Klaus, leads us masterfully through an intensely imagined world in this surprising fable by poet and Gothic expert Wolf ( The Essential Dracula ). His quest is to retrieve Amalanthusa, a princess set on a glass mountaintop by her lustful father. This astounding tale begins and ends in a tower, where Klaus and his rival, hare-lip Fritz, wait out the night, their lives unfolding in stories replete with fairy-tale elements: a "Witch of the Woods," an evil goat, a Persian soothsayer with a riddle. The interlocked stories, all organized around the search for the beautiful princess, are often told to us by other characters. Klaus's controlled irony makes the fable current and immediate: "I was a huge, fat man who had failed to outwit disaster." Themes of passion and loss are authoritatively contained by this incisive narration. The prose moves quickly, hypnotically, Klaus's voice the engine behind it. His steed dies and he observes from the tower "the sound of ravens busy with my horse. Their beaks made a distinct click . . . " Wolf's characters try and fail, often overtaken by erotic longings: violent male characters battle for sleeping, sexualized women. The mechanism of interlocked tales serves the novel's compression: the glass mountain, the witch's woods, the Eastern bazaar--these worlds are superbly crafted in terse, bold, musical language.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0879514981
• ISBN 13: 9780879514983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256