Laurie Sheck. (2016). Island of the Mad: A Novel. Catapult.

Laurie Sheck. 2016. Island of the Mad: A Novel. Catapult.

Laurie Sheck, Island of the Mad: A Novel. Catapult, 2016.

Laurie Sheck. Island of the Mad: A Novel. Catapult, 2016.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Sheck, Laurie
   • bioText: Laurie Sheck is the author of A Monster's Notes, a re–imagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Fictions of the year (2009), and long–listed for the Dublin Impac International Fiction Prize. Her five books of poems include Captivity and The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Nation. She is a member of the graduate faculty at the New School, and lives in New York City.
   • name: Laurie Sheck

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title

Island of the Mad

fullDescription

Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed A Monster's Notes, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language, Island of the Mad follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.
Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat–ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants—a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one thing—that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky's great novel, The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: "If there is one thing to take away from the powerful collage of allusions, imagery, and lyricism in Laurie Sheck's Island of the Mad, it is the fundamental importance of human connection. The book foregrounds longed-for and missed connections, half-hearted and tenuous ones, imagined ones, and so many others. As the novel illustrates, even as life takes its unexpected and painful turns, scarring us, stripping off parts of who we are, we persist in our search for connections, which nourish us at moments of greatest need . . . Indeed, there is no better evidence for art's capacity to foster connections than Sheck's own warm and lyrical narrative."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal
   • content: "Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act...A dizzyingly inventive work that reveals a strong sense of human connectedness; highly recommended for anyone who doesn't want just plot."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "[P]oet and poetic novelist Sheck draws on classic works [...] to create an exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche...In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content:

     "[Island of the Mad] reads like a lucid dream...Sheck pulls readers through the time-worm canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike."

5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse... [T]here's a rhythmic force to Sheck's repeated tropes..."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye, A Memoir and Once
   • content: "Laurie Sheck is a true American original, and Island of the Mad is a remarkable hybrid text that at once pushes the boundaries of literary fiction and poetry and speaks to the reader with tremendous insight and compassion about human suffering and survival. At once wise and thrilling, beautiful and challenging, mysterious and inviting, Sheck's work cuts to the heart of all that is most challenging and wondrous about human experience. To read Island of the Mad is to have 'felt the world touch' us - as the narrator puts it - 'with its strange, unpredictable hand.' And what else could we want of literature but this?"
7. • premium: False
   • source: Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift
   • content: “Laurie Sheck's The Island of the Mad is nothing short of brilliant. Its hybrid form hovers between poetry and fiction; grounded in a deep understanding of the past it is also perfectly contemporary in its idioms and concerns. This is ambitious, cutting edge work, both intimate and daringly literary at once. Laurie Sheck is an American Original."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Machine Dreams
   • content: "Laurie Sheck's The Island of the Mad plunges into language like a silken dagger, removing us to plague years and haunted mysteries that might just remind us of contemporary lives and dreams. An amazing, exhilarating read that creates its own maze and accompanies the reader deeper and deeper into a miraculous world."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
   • content: “Compelling, mysterious and hard to shake...utterly one of a kind."
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 10, 2016
      In her follow-up to A Monster’s Notes, Sheck again channels the voice of a disfigured protagonist to create this novel that reads like a lucid dream. Told in short chapters composed of choppy paragraphs, the book starts with reclusive Ambrose A. at his menial job electronically archiving old books, somewhere in America. In a break from routine, one day he receives a letter from a coworker he’s never spoken to asking him to go to Venice in search of a mysterious notebook. Although he is hunchbacked and suffers from a rare medical condition that causes his bones to break easily—such as by walking through the city—Ambrose embarks to the Venetian Lagoon and San Servolo, the “Island of the Mad,” where he begins to have visions of Frieda, a young woman who lived through the Venetian plague of 1557. Heavy with allusions to Russian authors Dostoyevski, Turgenev, and Bulgakov—Frieda is a character from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—Sheck’s book takes up weighty themes such as perspectivism and the nature of time by considering 16th-century Venice through the eyes of writers and artists who found themselves in the city. Although the book can feel repetitive, with colors and motifs repeating themselves ad nauseam, the book’s insularity is also one of its strengths. Sheck pulls readers through the time-worm canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 1, 2016
      A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse.And how might all that hang together, you ask? In Shecks second novel (A Monsters Notes, 2009), tenuously, though its lyricism softens its digressive style. The narrator, Ambrose, is a hunchbacked man who once toiled scanning books, and an unnamed former co-worker has sent him a letter beckoning him to visit her in Venice to help her locate a notebook that might shed light on an illness thats made her sleepless. From there, things get woolly: Ambrose dreams of encounters with Pontius Pilate and the Italian painter Titian, receives more letters thick with references to Bulgakovs novel The Master and Margarita, then discovers a notebook by an epileptic man who read to an ailing woman from Dostoevskys The Idiot. The story is salted with historical anecdotes about Venices suffering during a 16th-century plague (the title refers to a quarantine site near the city), and early on Ambroses trip there suggests a literary detective story. But the novel ultimately becomes too free-wheeling in plot and language to hew to such convention. Chapters are usually a page long and often as brief as a sentence, expressing sorrow and loss but without much characterization or context to make those expressions substantive. (Her sleeplessness carried her into a vulnerability that grew oddly beautiful and porous even as it filled with struggle.) What Sheck means to get at, in an abstract and indirect way, is the way loneliness and distance persist through the ages, both in life and literature, and how we might be able to transcend it through words. No question, theres a rhythmic force to Shecks repeated tropesswatches of red cloth, grim plague journals, the complexities of the space-time continuum. But one also feels that, for all the book's innovation, a lot of time-folding storytelling and dour invocations are serving a well-worn truism about our being alone in the universe. A brash but overly tangled poetry-prose hybrid.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 15, 2016
      

      A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and author of the reverberant A Monster's Tale, a rethinking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act. Her protagonist, a hunchback named Ambrose, physically fragile but mentally robust, is prompted by a mysterious missive to run off to Venice in search of a lost notebook. Past and present, history and literature all blend as Ambrose encounters Pontius Pilate, his unfortunate dog, the artist Titian, a lovely young woman named Freida convicted of murder in the past century, and characters from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In addition, there are frequent scenes of Venice during the terrible 1575 plague, as doctors with their distinctively beaked plague masks swoop through the text. Finally, Ambrose arrives at San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, where an abandoned hospital has been turned into a conference center. There he finds papers from two former inmates that further complicate his quest. VERDICT A dizzyingly inventive work that reveals a strong sense of human connectedness; highly recommended for anyone who doesn't want just plot.

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 2016
      Ambrose lives patiently with a cruel affliction that causes his bones to easily break and that has burdened him with a large hump, yet when his coworker in a small basement room where they scan books for digitization, a silent, sleepless woman, leaves him a note, asking him to go to Venice to search for a notebook, he does so. As in A Monster's Notes (2009), poet and poetic novelist Sheck draws on classic worksher characters are obsessed with Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margaritato create an exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche. Ambrose, so tenderly portrayed, finds himself in a city as fragile in its underpinnings as he is, where he is steeped in books; assailed by ghostly voices, including that of the painter Titian; and awash in tragic accounts of the plague years and the scourge of epilepsy. In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed A Monster's Notes, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language, Island of the Mad follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.
Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat–ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants—a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one...

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