The Desire Notebooks [Paperback]

John High (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2002

Fiction. A finalist for the 1999 Heacon Award, THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS constructs, through three brilliantly realized apercus, one woman's confrontation with death and its threads of self- and nation-hood. "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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Abstract, vivid and difficult, this harrowing first novel from PW contributing editor High (The Sasha Poems) combines metaphysical speculation with attention to the landscape and religion of Russia. High's three segmentsAentitled "The Book of Mistranslations," "A Face of Desire" and "The Monks Overlooking the Story"Adescribe the recurrence and survival of human desire under the most adverse conditions. Fragments of letters, dialogues, prose poems and descriptive passages bleed into one another to follow a pair of young lovers and a pair of monks, whose travails, though focused on the present, take place over a 1000-year arc of Russian history. The unnamed lovers suffer extreme deprivation in the metaphysical Siberia of contemporary Russia, a place defined by cold, cancer, morphine and nausea. Struggling to stay together, trying to connect through body, word and writing, the lovers are sustained in their secular journey by the monks Peter and Ezekiel, who, High suggests, have been repeatedly reincarnated, always looking for ways to heal each other's pain. An epigraph from Simone Weil resonates with other gnomic prose throughout the novel, invoking an unseen, perpetually ramifying "event" all human beings must choose to accept. Often poetic to the point of hermeticism, High's prose can seem unpolished or pretentious, not quite able to hold together its narrative. At the same time, readers may respond to High's spiritual and intellectual ambition, his accurately conveyed desire to make a novel tell the story of love and death, always and everywhere. One form of clarity is provided by photographs throughout, never before released from the Sovfoto/Eastfoto Archives. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

High is a poet (Sasha Poems) and translator of Russian poetry, so it's not surprising that this latest work is dominated by its dense, poetic language and haunting imagery. Not quite a novel, the book is more a series of scenes and notations by refugees of the collapsing Russian empire. 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. Unfortunately, High's book is so abstract as to be practically inaccessible to the average reader. The narrative has no progression but slips back repeatedly over the same images, sometimes even the same passages. Characters aren't even named, let alone developed, and it is hard to tell who is real and who is hallucination. Recommended only for large literary collections.AReba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 287 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil; 1 edition (July 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881471330
• ISBN-13: 978-1881471332
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,859,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Desire Notebooks: A Work of Eros, September 29, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (At Large) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Desire Notebooks (Paperback)

Allegra Wong [e-mail]

John High's novel is a memorial triptych for a lover and soul-mate. Landscape, intense longing, eros, her slow dying, and his sorrow blend and become one. THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS achieves for John High the true vision of an author-to painstakingly extract lessons, morals, and insights from his soul and transpose them to text. He tells the story of the Russian struggle of inner life not only through his central protagonists but also through the forsaken landscape. The central characters and their honed interior longings, reflected in the stark and sprawling landscape of Siberia, give the book intellectual depth and weight. The prose is precisely rendered. It is intelligent, sensitive, and passionate writing in the tradition of Pessoa, Duras, Figes, Cortazar, Maso, and Calvino.

"Sitting so close and only touching...He wanted to lay her down and enter her. Immediately. Possess her. Instead he went to the toilet and glanced out the window. His ghost like her ghost...Later when he told her of his masturbation, she suggested it was only male heat, intoxication, a restlessness... It came to her in the next day that if she stopped her meditation, perhaps she could let him possess her. The way a man wants to possess a woman. But she masturbated in the public latrine in order to sustain the desire while keeping him distant and fluent in her imagination. That way she thought...the absence of a personal history would better suit him on the next journey...[then] her stroking him from behind on the thigh, saying-it's all right now. We should sleep together."

It is desire. "If one has not known the passion which takes this form, physical desire, one knows nothing," said Duras. It is a tumultuous desire, balanced between her living and dying, inextricable from her dying; a desire calling the central characters down thoroughfares to spiritual parts of themselves, permitting them to see their eternal selves waiting.

It is obsession, the central characters' obsession with wisdom and with each other, and with their need to listen to each other, suffer, console, kiss, caress.

"The truth of her death would suggest more, yet he could not comprehend it. Anymore than he could understand the dreams A doubling of his own past. A sky, whitened out like snow. Like a page. A vanishing countryside. And more wine as they traveled on their way. A history once overlooked is not forgotten, she said, shaking his arm and kissing him. Reveal facts, buried feelings...is this what she had whispered when he touched the blackness on her throat?"

High's novel is a work of eros-subtle, challenging, unpredictable, and at the same time, empowering with emotions and passion, and infusing all aspects of human life.

It is violence:

"Read me more, she had beseeched him on the trains. Read me more she begged after he placed his coat around her naked shoulders, carried her away from the men who were still pulling up the trousers of their uniforms at the border."

It is learning the definition of love:

"Love doesn't mean to look at one another, you know-but in the same direction."

And it is memoir, the genre which turns life into art by permitting only versions of any experience to be told:

"Trying to reconstruct the events would be impossible. So let memory have them. She had told him this as they walked across the white beach."

THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS portrays the frightening immensity (culture, eros, vision, desire) of the human soul. You read one page, then another and another. You watch the light sweep in, find you are on the threshold of your world within.

10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pedantic Sex, Muddy Prose, April 17, 2000

By 

John Dolan (the eXile, Moscow) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Desire Notebooks (Paperback)

When I ordered this book I had the callow notion that it would be readable. Unfortunately, the author has nibbled a little California theory-cheese and learned to blur all he does so that the dim, who always mistake obscurity for profundity, will be too overawed to notice the fact that what he's written is actually the ultimate eighties cliche: high-culture soft porn, rather like a Greenaway film in print form, overwritten sex and ponderous scenery. Many a belated Lacanian provincial will wriggle excitedly, awed by the very muddiness and sloth of High's grand paragraphs.