Anima Rising
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
“A brilliant amalgamation of history, literature, horror, humor and humanity, unfolding with page-turning energy.” — Petalama Argus-Courier
From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a hilariously deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, and an undead woman’s electrifying journey of self-discovery.
Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman’s nude body in the Danube canal. He knows he should summon a policeman, but he can’t resist stopping to make a sketch first. And as he draws, the woman coughs. She’s alive!
Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse Wally tend to the formerly-drowned girl. She’s nearly feral and doesn’t remember who she is, or how she came to be floating in the canal. Klimt names her Judith, after one of his most famous paintings, and resolves to help her find her memory.
With a little help from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Judith recalls being stranded in the arctic one hundred years ago, locked in a crate by a man named Victor Frankenstein, and visiting the Underworld.
So how did she get here? And why are so many people chasing her, including Geoff, the giant croissant-eating devil dog of the North?
Poor Things meets Bride of Frankenstein in Anima Rising, Christopher Moore’s most ingenious (and probably most hilarious) novel yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The hilarious if overstuffed latest from Moore (Razzmatazz) draws on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for a tale of fin de siècle Vienna. In 1911, painter Gustav Klimt rescues a drowning woman from the Danube canal and brings her back to his studio, where she is cared for by one of his models. The woman has no memory of who she is or how she wound up in the canal. Klimt names her Judith after one of his paintings, and he turns to the world's leading psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, to help cure her amnesia. When Freud hits a dead end, he taps his colleague Carl Jung, who agrees to hypnotize Judith. The incredible story she narrates under hypnosis involves surviving in the Arctic after being stranded there with exiled mad scientist Victor Frankenstein and his monster and interventions from Raven, an Inuit deity. As Moore delays clarifying whether Judith is telling the truth, his own imagination swings into overdrive. He contemplates the sex lives of Klimt and Egon Schiele, writes pastiches derived from Frankenstein and the Freud-Jung correspondence, and even finds room to include a grating failed artist named Hitler. This shaggy-dog story will test some readers' patience, though there's plenty of fun to be had. Fans of Moore's other artist-inspired novel, Sacre Bleu, will be entertained.
Customer Reviews
Weirdly, for the depth of research and the endearing relationships
Between the main characters, unsatisfying. I’m used to the mixture of myth and real world along with rapid roll ups in previous works but this left me a little cold.
That, and the (acknowledged) sensitivity of our age to the cultural norms of that time adds to the challenge of accepting characters for what they are portrayed to be.
I’m not well enough read to fully grasp the nuances of Freud and Jung. I think a bit of reading around this and a re-read will probably elevate the experience.