Customer Reviews

Smile on the Void

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SMILE ON THE VOID is the unofficial history of Ralph M'Botu Kitaj, written by John Hall, former science fiction writer and Kitaj's secretary/companion.

Born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, Kitaj was smuggled out and adopted by an aristocratic French family. When they died on safari in Africa he apprenticed himself to a shaman. As a young man Kitaj had a torrid love affair with a witch-woman high in the African mountains of Ruwenzori, which resulted in a son and a murder.

Kitaj spends the next period of his life becoming the richest man in the world, then throws most of it away in a study of spiritual things, letting go of his worldly cares and answering the suppressed calling he has felt since he was a child. This finally leads to his spectacular transformation - disappearing into thin air- in Venice in 1992, with the promise that he will return in 1999, a new Messiah for a new millennium.

The narrator spends an incredible amount of time describing Kitaj's spiritual experiences and inner journeys to enlightenment. It got to be a bit much at times, I had to force myself to read through the middle hundred or so pages of the book, and thought if I saw the phrases "mythreality" or "newconsciousness" much more, I would scream. There is disappointingly little meat to these descriptions either; hints are dropped about telekinetic powers or UFOs from Sirius which are never explained.

The narrator himself quotes a journalist's assessment of the messiah Kitaj, which states that anything written about the man tells more about the writer than the subject. This is indeed the case with this book, it is more John Hall's history and inner life than Kitaj's. I don't know if this is an unintended irony, or a brilliant bit of writing.

If you like a story with an unreliable (possibly crazy) narrator, read the chilling WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver.