The Book of Breathing

The whole world and its deepest mythic impulses converge in this swift-paced novel by Luigi Ferdinando Dagnese. And who better to detect the necrophilic penchant amidst the postmodern claptrap of California than an immigrant expert in ancient religions and translator of hieratic texts recently appointed at Stanford University? The protagonist Gian’s confession to himself carries us inexorably toward a complex crime that springs from his passion for a “real” Isis (Belgian-Egyptian Dalya) and his own fated resemblance to “Osiris” (her dead brother Rammy). Not since the tryst of Molly and Bloom on Howth Head has literature known such a luscious sticky kiss as that enjoyed by “mother-sister” Dalya and “beloved-brother” Gian, the sensuous sacrament of absolute love. Our irrepressible yearning for immortality is incarnated in Seto Sasanuma, Dalya’s super-rich Japanese husband and Silicon Valley titan, champion of “post-cybernetic humanism” via information technology, while the flamboyant academic superstar Jean-Jacques Bertrand represents cultic mysticism. Each polarity attracts a gaggle of women who need to be devoted to an answer. Dagnese’s evocation of contemporary craziness in Palo Alto reaches a truly magical level when he shifts the scene and the story’s climax to the Pacific coast at Carmel. There are spellbinding juxtapositions – for example, glitzy grandiosity, such as Seto’s copy of the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling in his cavernous office, as against the often hypnotic actual beauty of nature. We reach the mysterious edge, the placental sea where birds of augury swirl as in Joyce’s "Portrait" and "Ulysses". Keeping his eye on the prize, a future family in Dalya and her son Ayako, Gian manipulates several of his own ex-lovers and the rival antagonists toward a surprising solution. Dagnese daringly incorporates Clint Eastwood as a genuine guru of the Far West into the outcome. This boldness caps the audacity of Dagnese’s co-opting the name of a living person, the brilliant scholar Gian Balsamo, author inter alia of "Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self" (2004), for his unusual anti-hero. Through its wry insights into all-too-human faddishness and corruption, "The Book of Breathing" could well qualify as an “academic novel” worthy to stand alongside the best by Angus Wilson and David Lodge. But it is much more: a thriller such as Hitchcock would delight in; for terror pulsates in every breadth, as the truth of myth trumps the thin veneer of normalcy in a way that astounds us. (Gerald Gillespie - Stanford University)