The
Desire Notebooks by John High
ISBN
1-881471-33-0 $14.95 US |
$19.95 CAN 280 pages
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In this
transportive novel, High penetrates to the heart of fervor, the
serrated need at the
core of human love. Village
Voice Literary Supplement, The Lit Parade: Our 25 Favorites of 1999
…accurately conveyed desire to make a novel tell the
story of love and death, always
and everywhere. Publisher’s
Weekly
Whether it’s set during the Revolution or much later
isn’t clear, nor does it really matter,
for the sense of loss, rootlessness, and the horrors of war
remain the same no matter
what the time period. Perhaps because of the grim reality,
the characters’ awareness of
spirituality and humanity are heightened.
Library Journal
Is it possible to translate and transpose the slippery
texture of desire? For John High,
it is both possible and impossible, and his own attempt at
the task has resulted in the
genre-bending triptych he calls The Desire Notebooks. His
is a difficult, haunted, heartbreakingly
lyrical book, fraught with allegory, agile at “wandering in
and out of history”; it winds concentrically
along parallel tracks in search of “a language of desire
that outlives each desire in and of itself.”
Rain Taxi
John High…..pushes prose past myth’s exploitation and
across a protean inner landscape,
where vision explodes on impact with the yearnings of body
and soul. The story of two lovers
and their passage on a train through the harsh Siberian
winter, this is also the story of the
Notebooks, notebooks that contain the story within a story,
one that folds over – and unfolds from –
a journey into the fractal of the spirit.
Web Del Sol, Editor’s Picks, December 1999
John High’s expansive opus, The Desire Notebooks,
pulsates with fullness and loss. It’s always
startling to find yourself close to someone whose vibrant
voice responds to every nuance of the
breathing world, whose sentient experience is so awake that
you find yourself awakened. This
work roves through rituals of experience and imagination,
taking us there.
Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun
John High writes in a dense dreamy shorthand that
manages to capture several
complex worlds at once.
Molly Giles, author of Creek Walk and Other Stories
A beautiful book: luminous, mysterious,
hypnotic.
Carole Maso, author of Defiance
It is intelligent, sensitive, and passionate writing
in the tradition of Pessoa,
Duras, Figes, Cortazar, Maso, and
Calvino. Amazon.com
John High
