NP: the muse asylum

[Roman Kudryashov]

"...Horace Jacob Little was more talked about than read. He was most famous
for the strange circumstances of his personality, for his seclusion, his
solitude. He was not much more than a fiction himself... In contrast to his
first books, Horace Jacob Little 's later work was experimental and
difficult, filled with allusions and bursts of madcap, sometimes barely
intelligible prose...  He had grown up in Long Island... published his first
novel at 25, soon after graduating from Brown. He lived for a time in
Mexico, then Vienna..."

The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski
http://www.amazon.com/Muse-Asylum-David-Czuchlewski/dp/0142000604

>>>Reminded me a lot of Pyncon, though I suppose that can be any recluse
writer, as some other passages, particularly about the book jackets suggest
"HJL had insisted on blank covers for all his books. No illustrations, no
capsule biographies..." (like Salinger)

Blurb:
>From Publishers Weekly
Genius and madness blur in a daring, self-consciously literary debut that
runs circles around the postmodern chestnut, the "death of the author," to
speculate on the murderous theft of an author's identity. Czuchlewski, a
24-year-old medical student who started work on the book as a senior thesis
project at Princeton, may lack the visionary gifts of the fictional author
at his novel's center, but he has crafted a stylish, assured and gripping
work of fiction. Jake Burnett, fresh out of Princeton, takes a reporting job
with the Manhattan Ledger, a rundown weekly rag. He and his editor hatch a
circulation-boosting plan to track down Horace Jacob Little, a Pynchonesque
cult author who has never been photographed or interviewed. Meanwhile,
Jake's former classmate Andrew Wallace, is documenting his own encounters
with Little furiously penning his "Confessions" from his room in the Muse
Asylum, a residential psychiatric facility for artists. For Andrew, tracking
the author is more than just a hobby; his obsession with Little's identity
permeates his troubled "Confessions." Jake and Andrew are linked not only by
their interest in Little but by their romantic infatuation with Lara
Knowles, a fellow Princetonian who dated both men and had planned to wed
Andrew before his psychiatric break. When Lara lends Jake her copy of
Andrew's "Confessions," Jake discovers that Andrew's schizophrenic rant may
point to a surprising truth about Little that puts both Andrew and Jake in
danger. While some of Czuchlewski's prose has the amateurish enthusiasm of
an undergraduate taking his first class in literary criticism (the plot
summaries of Little's stories make the fabled author seem like an ersatz
Borges), the novel is well plotted, with nuanced characters and real
intellectual heft. Czuchlewski is a writer to watch.



>>>Comments?
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