The Feast of Fools

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.