Thursday, August 19, 2010

THE ACOLYTES: A NOVEL

Forthcoming from EYECORNER PRESS this fall:

For over a century New York City has been a magnet for the splendors and miseries of Bohemian self-realization. Rainer J. Hanshe's engrossing and entertaining narrative depicts the yearning of the young artist for success, acceptance, fulfillment. The Acolytes is a dark, searing tale of hope becoming obsession, admiration festering into entrapment, excitement bending into curse. Gabriel starts as a naive young man full of dedication to high art and to the transformative powers of the imagination. In Amos, the renegade of American letters whose sour alienation from the world has made him that much more of a cult figure, Gabriel thinks he has found his guiding star. Circling Amos is always Ivan, the charismatic yet sinister theater director who exerts a strange, mesmeric power over the author and his entire coterie. We also meet Terence, the unobtrusive moral fulcrum of the novel who cannot keep a mad world sane, and a cast of other men and women unable to escape from the welter of exploitation to which their lack of self-knowledge condemns them. In sounding the depths of Ivan’s depravity, Hanshe provides a vision of incarnate unabated evil rarely seen in this time of temporizing and bogus empathy. Indeed, for all its scouring of a false and cultic art, The Acolytes stands up for a renewed sense of the novel as difficult testimony to the rigors of craft. Replete with horrors that rise to the grandeur of myth, The Acolytes is a novel like no other.

*

This remarkable piece of writing is at once erotic and eccentric, wide-ranging and detailed. Give those Acolytes a try!—Mary Ann Caws, author of The Surrealist Look (MIT), ed. Surrealist Painters and Poets, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Salvador Dali, etc.


*

The Acolytes is an original and powerful visionary novel which introduces and explores territory—heroic idealism, its illusions and discontents—rarely touched on in American fiction. It addresses deep longings and aspirations that most artists have swept to the side, which is not only courageous, it could prove beneficial to our culture. Hanshe gives promise of becoming a truly important writer.—Daniela Blau


*
 
The Acolytes flies in the face of mainstream publishing with its eye on something bigger and vaster than the conventional marketplace. In mode its allegorical approach is so different than the types of Jonathan Franzen “family sagas” that publishers pick up on nowadays. It’s quirky, weird, and mannered and many of the scenes have the strange power of dreams. They proceed according to their own logic, stately as yachts, moving irrevocably, like Time. Like John Cowper Powys, Hanshe has the talent for making other species come to life.—Kevin Killian

*

The Acolytes is fascinating, a highly unusual and unexpected book. It is the kind of work one would not expect from a young American writer today. It is a powerful novel that reverberates in the inner spaces of the self. The characters are vivid and remarkable and the story is moving, it lingers on and makes one think-feel. The world evoked in the book is one that seems to be very much “out of season.” Not that it is outmoded, belonging to an earlier bygone age. It seems rather outside of time altogether, belonging to a period that is not now, but never was in the first place. And there are many moments in the book when humor and tragedy interpenetrate, which is the ideal goal of a storyteller.—Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis; The Myth of Power & Self: Essays on Kafka

*

Hanshe's writing is eloquent and indicates a profound knowledge of life. He has a sharp and quick intelligence, humor, and great sensitivity and emotional perception.—Nan Goldin

*

Hanshe's work is quite beautiful, disturbing in its real and implied violence, sad in its loss, but very true. His desire to constantly challenge us, force us to think and sweat and feel, and his good humor and humanity make him a serious writer in my opinion: someone we're sure to hear a great deal from in the future.—Jose Rivera

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