Customer Reviews

The Desire Notebooks

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Allegra Wong ah@meganet.net

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.

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.