While I was trying to recover from yet another headcold this weekend, I finally read a book that I have had on my shelves since last August...The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski.
This was David's first book. I really enjoyed it. Then again, I enjoy postmodern fiction. This one is not as hard to follow as some postmodern pieces. Chapters are told in one of two voices and are clearly identified when the voice is not Jake's. Czuuchlewski has since followed it up with Empire of Light. I'll want to read that one too.
Muse Asylum is a piece of postmodern fiction told in the voice of Jake Barnett, reporter and graduate of Princeton. Jake is interested in a mysterious reclusive author named Horace Jacob Little that has influence himself and other Princeton graduates. Besides storylines with a love interest, friendships, wrestling with one's place in society and the workforce, the raises questions such as:
- Does an author have the right to be anonymous?
- Do readers have rights to know biographical information about authors?
- What are the boundaries between creative genius and insanity?
A quote from the text concerning Jake's first contact with a book by Little:
"A stray paperback, overstocked or misordered, fell into the possession of my high school English teacher. Recognizing nothing of what would come of it, she gave me this copy of The Unreal City, Horace Jacob Little's early masterpiece of love and betrayal. It did not look promising to me. Of the book's six hundred pages, the first twenty provided a detailed history and geography of its fictional setting. At the time I was a fan of books in which vampires have killed several people by page twenty. Worst of all, the cover was blank except for the title and the author's anme. It looked unfinished -- something long and tedious that the publisher simply gave up on and sent out without bothering to commission artwork."(9)