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    The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
    The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
    The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    The Eroica Trilogy: Selections

    By Eugene K. Garber

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    About this ebook

    Boldly go where most minds have never gone before with these FREE selections from master of magical realism Eugene K. Garber's Eroica Trilogy:

    Vienna ØØ, the first in the series, is populated by characters who closely resemble actual luminaries of fin de siècle Vienna—Mahler, Schiele, Klimt, Freud. But the real hero is the city herself. And the inexorable movement of the book is one of disrobing, an exquisite striptease. In these cunningly constructed stories the reader's engagement never flags, for nothing ever seems quite predestined. At every twist and turn hope and fear hang suspended until the last word, and often beyond.

    O Amazonas Escuro, second in the series, portrays the adventures of K, a scientific anthropologist who is hell bent on bringing rational order to his descriptions of the culture of a tribe of Amazonian indigenes. But the tribe will not have it, persisting in its mythological treatments of sky, river, animals and self. Nor will outside visitors to the tribal compound, bringing with them botanical passions, wounds of war, erotic obsession, and cinematographic exploitation. Looming over the entire enterprise are spirits of clashing ideals, resonant voices of western thinkers from Plato to Derrida.

    In The House of Nordquist, the final novel of The Eroica Trilogy, Eugene K. Garber creates his most demonic character of the series. Deep in the infernal regions of the bizarre house of his mad father, the Faustian Eric Nordquist conducts an atrocious experiment, extracting sounds for a world-changing symphony from the body of a Holocaust victim. He sucks everyone around him into the vortex of his mad dream of a cleansing cataclysm. His most devoted follower, Paul Albright, not only assists in the experiment but becomes infected with unholy powers. Now, years later, the House of Nordquist burned to the ground by an unknown arsonist, Eric is on the loose with the score of his abysmal symphony and Paul is in pursuit. Can Paul find Eric and the sinister score? If he does, what will he do?

    The novels of The Eroica Trilogy share the common strategy of "genre iconoclasm." Where history is foregrounded, e.g. in Vienna ØØ, actual characters are renamed and their personalities rendered unstable. Where anthropology is central, e.g. in O Amazonas Escuro, ethnography is subjected to philosophical inspection and comic absurdity.  In The House of Nordquist the conventions of Gothic fiction and mystery novels are radically skewed by the deflections of metafiction and indeterminacy.

    Because the three novels are not narratively woven as in some trilogies, like Dos Passos's monumental USA, they need not be read in order. In fact, readers may profitably begin with the last published work, The House of Nordquist, because it brings to a dramatic and thematic climax virtually all of the questions of the trilogy:

    * Is art salvational, or is it an anti-social act of destructive rebellion?
    * Can art ever escape the coils and thereby affect the course of history?
    * Why is the reaction to the avant-garde always so fierce?

    Reading The House of Nordquist and then going back to the earlier novels, or beginning with Vienna ØØ and then progressing through to the deep-rooted entanglements that eventuate in the evil flower that is Eric Nordquist, are equally rewarding experiences. Either way, get started. You will get hooked.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTransformations Press
    Release dateJul 7, 2018
    ISBN9781732103849
    The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
    Author

    Eugene K. Garber

    Eugene K. Garber has published five books of fiction and is the creator, with eight other artists, of EROICA, a hypermedia fiction (http://hypereroica.com/). His fiction has won the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award and the William Goyen Prize for Fiction sponsored by TriQuarterly. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His short fiction has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (1988), Revelation and Other Fiction from the Sewanee Review, The Paris Review Anthology, and Best American Short Stories.

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      Book preview

      The Eroica Trilogy - Eugene K. Garber

      THE EROICA TRILOGY: SELECTIONS

      EUGENE K. GARBER

      TRANSFORMATIONS PRESS

      Copyright 2018 by Eugene K. Garber

      Cover art by Lynn Hassan and David J. Bookbinder

      Book design by David J. Bookbinder

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner now known or hereafter invented without prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      ISBN: 9781732103849

      Published in Danvers, Massachusetts by Transformations Press.

      Transformations Press

      85 Constitution Lane 300-C4

      Danvers, MA 01923

      978-395-1292

      info@transformationspress.org

      Printed in the United States of America.

      Other Books by Eugene K. Garber

      Metaphysical Tales

      The Historian

      Beasts in Their Wisdom

      Vienna ØØ

      O Amazonas Escuro

      The House of Nordquist

      Other Transformations Press Books

      The Art of Balance

      Paths to Wholeness

      52 Flower Mandalas

      52 (more) Flower Mandalas

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Book I: Vienna ØØ

      Book II: O Amazonas Escuro

      Book III: The House of Nordquist

      About the Author

      Thank You!

      Preface

      The novels of The Eroica Trilogy (Vienna ØØ, O Amazonas Escuro, and The House of Nordquist) share a common parentage: Eroica, a hypermedia fiction (http://hypereroica.com/) designed for the web and completed in collaboration with eight other artists. They also share the common strategy of genre iconoclasm. Where history is foregrounded, e.g. in Vienna ØØ, actual characters are renamed and their personalities rendered unstable. Where anthropology is central, e.g. in O Amazonas Escuro, ethnography is subjected to philosophical inspection and comic absurdity. In The House of Nordquist the conventions of Gothic fiction and mystery novels are radically skewed by the deflections of metafiction and indeterminacy.

      Basically, the parent web work focuses on three different places at three different times: fin de siècle Vienna, the mid-20th century Hudson Valley, and the upper Amazon at the turn of the 20th century. What holds these three disparate places and times together is the theme of the innovative artist struggling against an averse and often venomous conservatism in his or her culture. The three web work strands share a basic narrative structure and a closely similar cast of characters.

      As I transformed the hypermedia fictions into a set of three novels, I created significant modifications of the web materials. This was surely inevitable because of the radical differences between hypermedia and print. In any case, characters and plots, while retaining their original outlines and settings, underwent significant changes. One central alteration will suffice for illustration—that of the main character of each set. The composer of the Vienna web work becomes in the novel Vienna ØØ somewhat less heroic and even something of a buffoon in several comic episodes. The female composer of the Amazonian web work is transformed into a male anthropologist, the protagonist of O Amazonas Escuro, but his struggle to remain true to his indigenous subjects are, like hers, imperiled by malevolent interference and violence. The character of the composer of the Mid-Hudson web work becomes in The House of Nordquist an even darker figure, more manic and Faustian.

      Readers who choose to explore together Eroica the hypermedia fiction and the descendant novels will of course experience the pervasive differences between hypermedia and print fictions, but they are also likely to hear root similarities between the actual played music of the hypermedia and the underlying rhythms and tenor of the novels.

      Because the three novels are not narratively woven as in some trilogies, like Dos Passos’s monumental USA, they need not be read in order. In fact, readers may profitably begin with the last published work, The House of Nordquist, because it brings to a dramatic and thematic climax virtually all of the questions of the trilogy:

      Is art salvational, or is it an anti-social act of destructive rebellion?

      Can art ever escape the coils and thereby affect the course of history?

      Why is the reaction to the avant-garde always so fierce?

      Reading The House of Nordquist and then going back to the earlier novels, or beginning with Vienna ØØ and then progressing through to the deep-rooted entanglements that eventuate in the evil flower that is Eric Nordquist, are equally rewarding experiences. Either way, get started. You will get hooked.

      Book I: Vienna ØØ

      Vienna ØØ is an assemblage of fifteen tightly woven episodes that take place primarily in fin de siècle Vienna. This is the first chapter of the novel. It introduces the reader to two principal characters: Loki, who will reappear in the novel in darker guises, and Bettina, who will also reappear, more mature and lovable. The theme of fin de siècle Vienna decadence runs throughout the novel, as does the theme of the struggle of true art against the often shallow aestheticism of the period. The comic character of this episode is shadowed in later chapters by anti-Semitism, psychological disorder, fascination with death, and imperial excess.

      BETTINA AND LOKI

      Willi’s Studio

      In Bettina’s nineteenth year there was Willi the painter the ugliest and most interesting man in Vienna who Bettina liked to imagine had appeared entirely at her call skipping across the Carpathians on magical feet to free her from hovering mother despised step-father and fragile virginity Willi smoking something aromatically dark and suave in a tiny meerschaum fronted by a turbaned pasha scudding like the cutwater of a prophetic ship toward a fateful crisis of imperial decadence and of course to Bettina all these lurid eddies of Art and Eros were very enticing.

      A garret of course and a swirl of untended bedclothes lusciously soiled and the old lion-claw tub pitted suggestively and the body-length mirror desilvered here and there and thus at night Bettina’s image

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