"the gargoyle" by andrew davidson

!!!spoiler alert!!!

read "the gargoyle" in march. the story is told through the perspective of an anonymous and dissolute porn producer who crashes his car while on a drug and alcohol binge. here, his story begins. the crash leaves him mostly burned and physically immobile. he has no family to speak of and his friends abandon him. he contemplates suicide. then, out of the blue, a mental patient, marianne engel, professes to be his lover in a former life:

in germany in the 14th century, she was a nun and he a mercenary in a condotta. he is injured in battle by an arrow that threatened to pierce his heart, but only to be saved by a copy of dante's"infernal", which he kept tucked in his shirt. he is brought to her priory and she tends to him. they fall in love reading the "infernal". they leave the priory to make a life together. eventually, he is found by the condotta. as he is tortured, she shoots him in his heart with an arrow, to spare him further pain.

this past lifetime, marianne tells in vignettes and intersperses love stories of other places and times. ultimately, she with the help of the hospital staff, set him on a path of recovery, not only from his immediate physical trauma, but a spiritual one. yet, as he is progressing marianne becomes possessed by a compulsion to carve gargoyles that leaves her time to neither eat or sleep, and she wastes away.

how do you pull a jaded, apathetic person out of the depths of depression? davidson's answer is to entangle him in the embrace of an episode that can only be dream, nightmare, fantasy, to restore his wonderment at life.

the tale and writing begin strong, but the writing becomes a bit loose as the tale progresses, and the tale itself becomes a bit banal. the patient's psychedelic episode triggered by heroin withdrawal, however, brings all the tales to a somewhat satisfying, tidy purpose.

QUOTES:
(1) "your car gathers speed down the embankment, bouncing. your hypothesis is quickly proven correct: it is, indeed, quite painful. your brain catalogues the different sensations. there is the flipping end over end, the swirling disorientation, and the shrieks of the car as it practices its unholy yoga. there's the crush of metal, pressing against your ribs, there's the smell of the devil's mischievousness, a pitchfork in your ass and sulfur in your mouth. the bastard's there, all right, don't doubt it."
(2) "imagine turning on one of the elements of your stove--let's say it's the electric kind with black coils on top." [...] "a slight violet tinge will appear, nestled there in the black rings, and then the element assumes some reddish-purple tones, like unripe blackberries. it moves toward orange and finally--finally!--an intense glowing red." [...] "now, slam that sensitive, responsive hand directly onto that glowing element. and hold it there. hold it there as the element scorches dante's nine rings right into your palm, allowing you to grasp hell in your hand forever."
(3) "the graces, flashing smiles like smashed keyboards, would hand over their every penny to the dealer."
(4) "while i'm not claiming that i now feel great love for all people, i can state with some confidence that i hate fewer people than i used to. this may seem like a weak claim to personal growth,, but sometimes these things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position."
(5) "i had only the childish scrawls that blackened the pages' white purity. my words were egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie."

note: davidson acknowledges angela aki as the first person to read his book. could this be the singer/songwriter/pianist?

rating: 7/10