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by Harald Voetmann
In the eleventh century, in the city of Regensburg, Othlo of St. Emmeram lies on his sickbed and takes a journey through Heaven and Hell.
Spurning carnal desire and earthly temptations all his life, the mystic Othlo is now in the care of his brother monks including the odious and semen-filled Wolkbart. Despite the spare walls which surround him, he frolics with Holy Dionysius in the Garden of Head-bearers (each carries his own head for eternity), descends from the island of Heaven, visits a brothel patronized by fallen angels, and witnesses the souls of the once gluttoinous wealthy fighting over scraps of rotting crabmeat in a ditch in Hell.
The third and final book in a series about mankind's desire to conquer nature, Visions and Temptations follows Awake and Sublunar. In each novel, a great if imperfect mind faces is failed by the inevitable demise of the body.
"Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk's deathbed visions. Othlo's Dantean journey teaches him that sorrow is fleeting and salvation a matter of perspective. A Boschian vision quest―this masterpiece of morbidity is not to be missed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel―or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves―each scarcely more than a hundred pages―are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendor." ―New York Review of Books
This information about Visions and Temptations was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nominated for the Nordic Council Prize, the Danish author Harald Voetmann (b. 1978) has written novels, short stories, poetry, and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal.
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