Taming the Divine Heron
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The second novel in Pitol's Carnival trilogy following The Love Parade continues his daring, genre-melding, picaresque style.
From the famous Mexican author, Sergio Pitol, comes his 1988 classic translated by George Henson. Taming the Divine Heron tells the semi-autobiographical story of a novelist working on his newest masterpiece. The protagonist struggles to tell the perfect story—his own imagined protagonists mere imitations of the likes of Lord Jim and Alyosha Karamazov. To help eradicate writer’s block, Pitol uses his vessel to praise his own favorite authors. Pitol applauds Bakhtin’s world building, Gogol’s “carnivalesque [literary] breath,” and Dante’s dizzying intensity. The character finds a muse in Marietta Karapetiz, whom he aptly dubs Dante C. de la Estrella, and the two debate the literary greats.
As the pair attempts to pull from the techniques of the world’s best writers, Pitol creates a love letter to literature from around the globe while simultaneously telling his own magical story. To quote Pitol’s protagonist, “the quality of the story, its effects, its brilliance, its intensity, ma[k]e the most absurd circumstances plausible.” Taming The Divine Heron, second in a trilogy including already-published The Love Parade (Deep Vellum, 2022), houses history, hyperrealism, myth, folklore, and memoir; to read Pitol is to appreciate the power of language.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deep Vellum continues its revival of Mexican writer Pitol (1933–2018; The Love Parade) with this ribald postmodern classic, originally published in 1988 and appearing in English for the first time. An unnamed aging writer, convinced that his former books have been failures, sets out to write his masterpiece. The bulk of the novel comprises that masterwork, a picaresque narrative of another contemporary author, Dante C. de la Estrella, who regales his well-to-do hosts in the city of Tepoztlán with the story of his journey to Istanbul and encounter with Marietta Karapetiz, a "celebrated and hardened habituée of the seediest of banquets, the most repulsive of feasts, and the most unbridled of orgies." Karapetiz is also one of the world's foremost experts on Nikolai Gogol, whose work Estrella is devoted to, and about whom Karapetiz has developed a scandalous theory—that the Ukrainian master's writings were inspired by the devil himself. A battle of wills erupts between Estrella and the larger-than-life Karapetiz as he attempts to disprove her Gogol theory, only to find himself pulled deeper and deeper into her sensational underworld. Though the plot is convoluted, each page is lively and baroque, all the way up to the bizarre, paganistic conclusion. Like the vivacious Karapetiz, Pitol is never at a loss for words. This does not disappoint.
