Swimming in Trees: A Story of Soul [Paperback]

Maria Katzenbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

"Swimming in Trees" is a powerful, hallucinatory, magnificently woman-centered story about rising from the ashes to celebrate the creative life-loving force in all women.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Katzenbach aims to offer a visionary book that's part therapeutic novel and part spiritual allegory suffused with feminist and goddess themes. Styled as a murder mystery set in 1981 Rhinebeck, N.Y., the book is an account of the author's descent into madness, or what she calls "the swimming in trees." She attempts to demonstrate how, through the exercise of storytelling, she recovered her soul and returned to sanity after the loss of a beloved sibling. A pantherlike woman called Manda appears as the incarnation of murderous rage, the personification of the malignant force in Katzenbach's psyche. Manda's first appearance in black biker leather emphasizes the author's menacing aggression; a flashback to sexual abuse in the character's adolescence points out Katzenbach's vulnerability; a psychotic experience in an asylum underscores her craziness. Katzenbach bestows aspects of the goddess upon all her female characters: Rulla, for example, a homeless woman at the YWCA, is also Baubo, the pig goddess, who makes mothers in labor laugh. The author delves enthusiastically into a rich soup of symbolism, and her prose frequently attains the visionary density and power to which it aspires. But Katzenbach's blurring of the border between fiction and reality is more confusing than edifying. The manner in which she insists that the inner life is as real as the outer life?that what some call madness others experience as wisdom?winds up concealing more than it reveals.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Meem, the female protagonist of first novelist Katzenbach's visionary tale of female soul-healing, conjures up Manda, a leather-clad, diet cola-swilling embodiment of evil who has been on the run for 27,000 years murdering "Her." Manda instructs Meem to write the mystery of her pursuit of "Her," who, it turns out, is Meem's tortured soul. A most unusual collection of naked exercising goddesses, a best friend without a name, and past family tragedies add to the hallucinatory chaos of Meem's literary madness. Stylized phrases that serve as refrains to guide readers along Katzenbach's circuitous path, along with dreamlike sequences that are jarringly studded with the detritus of ordinary living, muddy the first two-thirds of this tale, which gives way to more traditional storytelling as the fragments are united. In an "interview" Katzenbach conducts with herself, she acknowledges that Swimming in Trees, a fictional retelling of her own journey to inner wholeness, is hard to grasp. For New Age collections.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 325 pages
• Publisher: Divina (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965952134
• ISBN-13: 978-0965952132
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,070,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Swimming In Trees: A Story of Soul, February 28, 2001

By 

Cassandra Barnes "Cassandra" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Swimming in Trees: A Story of Soul (Paperback)

Swimming In Trees: A Story of Soul, by Maria Stokes Katzenbach, is not an easy book. It is intriguing--once started, it can't be put aside to finish later. It is powerful, and mind-changing. It is compelling, and unique. But it is not easy.

Katzenbach says "my book is about overcoming my fear of madness." She adds that "I probably had to become crazy, in some way, and survive it before I could overcome that fear."

She turned her spiritual journey into a story in order to heal herself and embrace all that she is, including the goddess within. Through storytelling she found "my soul--my murdered soul. Alive." She learns the eternal truth of birth, death, rebirth.

Set in the Hudson Valley of New York state, much of the story occurs at the local Y, a place that is both a sanctuary and an asylum for women. Katzenbach's story is filled with unforgettable characters, like Manda, who has been running for 27,000 years, Rulla, the "Queen of the Y," and Benjamin, who understands far more than most five-year-olds. Katzenbach expertly weaves together individual and community forces to reach a startling, yet inevitable, denouement. She says "if my book opens the door to [when] women will all tell their own stories of soul, in their own voice, then Swimming In Trees will have done for others what it did for me..." Swimming in Trees: A Story of Soul is a woman's book for women who struggling to recover their souls. While it may not be an easy read, it's a good, rewarding read.