North of Yesterday - Softcover

McEvilley, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0914232851 ISBN 13: 9780914232858

Publisher: McPherson & Co, 1987

Synopsis

Spring was turning into summer. I stood where the waves crashed, waiting for Della in the late afternoon by the sea. Birds rested on the swelling crests, fluttered up from their closing grip, then rested again. The waves poured closer, the sun sank down, and the birds screeched on in their game of death.

And Della was no longer just late. She was not coming.

She had flown through the crack in the vase.... This compelling beginning to North of Yesterday sets the tone for an even more compelling journey that quickly follows, a travel beyond space and time into the terrain of the unconscious, the synaesthesia of dream. It is a novel of male psyche, the multi-layered recesses of mythology which define the object of desire and the destructive/redemptive quest. The tale forms a captivating matrix of the interior realm through an unfolding stream of cultural remnants (with archetypal and architectonic language), unmasking an essential conflict within the Western mind. There is both murder and mystery at its core, but it is a hermetic mystery of supra-consciousness, the transmigration of souls, and it may be that murder occurs nowhere but within the imagination... North of Yesterday is written in a fluid mixture of prose and verse. It incorporates classical meters and narration, and systematically interweaves the Orpheus myth with a contemporary situation: the story of a death by heroin overdose. Love, guilt, desire and degradation are paired in the stories of Della and Wally, and then again in those of Vincent and Waz, and made poignant mockery by a mad poet, Quintus of Smyrna. This is a bizarre epic of Everyman, a challenging prose invention with few antecedents: North of Yesterday joins that great tradition of sardonic, black-hearted comedies extending from Lautreamont's Maldoror and Huysman's Against Nature, to Hedayat's The Blind Owl and the latter works of William Burroughs.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas McEvilley is a professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he heads the new department of Art Criticism and Writing. The author of dozens of books and monographs of art history, classical philology, and philosophy (including the monumental The Shape of Ancient Thought), and three novels (including North of Yesterday, published by McPherson & Company), he lives in New York City. His art monographs include works on Julian Schnabel, Les Levine, Pat Steir, Ulay and Marina Abramovic, Janis Kounellis, and Bruce Conner. He appeared in two parts of the BBC television series "The State of the Art." His mosst recent book is The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism.

Review:

Its achievement will doubtless be taken by some as a truly remarkable one that amply rewards the investment... it demands. -- Choice

Passages of demented fustian grandeur read like the nightmares of the great gothic maniacs like Poe, Rimbaud, Lautremont and Baudelaire. -- City Paper (Baltimore)

The pleasure in reading North of Yesterday is the pleasure of reading, not that species of remembering we call 'plot.' -- The Review of Contemporary Fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson & Co
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0914232851
• ISBN 13: 9780914232858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223