Have you ever been with a new lover, someone you met on a beach somewhere, and they scare you? But you take them to your blanket anyway? And you gaze into their eyes anyway? And you give them your body, inch by spectacular inch? Anyway? Well, there is this moment when you realize you are about to lose yourself in the Other, so you hold hands to try to stay on this earthly plane. But you cannot, because, by now, their spirit has overtaken you, gotten inside of you, and started to rearrange things. Tiny animal noises emanate from your mouth or their mouth--you cannot tell whose anymore, because, at this point, you are one being.
It is not that way with all lovers, of course. And it is not that way with all books. But with Jonathan Shaw's Narcisa, it IS like that---it takes you beyond your mundane, day-to-day life, and plummets you straight into the Abyss, where Satan is your only tour guide and his dark angels attend your wounds.
You become something else after being with such a lover---and after immersing yourself in such a book. You become a person who was once predictable and easy to define, but is now someone beyond description or comprehension.
You can't really transmit something like this to anyone with mere words--they must fully experience it for themselves. There are things one simply cannot tell another person. They must have their own first-hand knowledge. Prison. Jail. Obsessive love run riot. Sex. Drugs. Murder. Betrayal. Love. Addiction. The Bottomless Pit. The Dark Night of the Soul. You get the picture.
Jonathan Shaw's protagonists, Cigano and Narcisa, are two lost souls, living in the gutter, but staring at the stars. These characters come from that special place where the animal meets the divine; the place where one fights the other for their stake in unspeakable things - things at once profane and sublime. These characters are both entertaining and tragic. They are the train wreck you cannot look away from, because to miss a single crucial detail would be a disservice to your own soul.
I always say that school gave me back my brains. It also did something to my nervous system that no amount of sex or accolades or external validation could ever do---Jonathan Shaw's Narcisa gives you back your soul and your heart in that same special way. It is a must read for anyone who struggles on this earthly coil with questions of sincerity, the search for God, or the tragic-comical, angelic and delusional quest for new life through another's body, mind and soul; questions whose answers are so disappointing and uninspiring, we might even consider death itself a worthy alternative.
Jonathan Shaw deals fearlessly with such questions, and hands them back to us in a way we can understand, and thereby be freed of our need to self-destruct in the face of such a drab disappointment of a world.
We are yours, Jonathan! Do whatever you want with us. Your book is not only life-changing, but might even teach us all how to be more bravely authentic. How to be courageous, even at the precipice of death. We are with you. We are you.
Do not look away from this book, dear reader. If you are of mediocre intellectual stock, of course, that would be the only way you ever could look upon such a harsh vision of Truth. But even if you have a suspect literary or genetic lineage, this book has the power to restore in you the divinity you were initially meant to manifest.
Narcisa is not for weaklings or idle spectators. This book is written for trail-blazing rebels like Shaw, readers and writers who make our world memorable.
Jonathan Shaw is at his finest and darkest here, but holding up a literary torch so blindingly bright, the reader can fight his own demons with it, while seeing exactly where, what, and who they are.
Lisa Douglass/JJ
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