Visions and Temptation

Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note (after Sublunar) with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk’s deathbed visions. While Othlo’s body lies broken in the monastery, waited on by his fellow monks, his spirit soars to the Garden of the Head-bearers, where he’s taken by the hand by a mysterious guide to celebrate Easter on an island of enormous lambs. From the City of Heaven to the brothels of Hell, born aloft on the back of sea serpents or consigned to the crack in the center of creation where the gluttonous trade their nails and teeth for rotten crabmeat and heathens suckle at the teat of monstrous swine, Othlo’s Dantean journey teaches him that sorrow is fleeting and salvation a matter of perspective. (As one sinner indignantly puts it, by what right does Othlo assume “that this suffering is a punishment rather than just the terms of the existence.”) Back in the earthly monastery, Othlo reckons with the problem of his wayward disciple, Heinrich, who left the order for lands unknown and must be saved from “these meaningless movements in the half-perished world.” Not only does the narrative succeed as a Boschian vision quest, it’s also a sober vigil of the body’s decline, one that finds comfort in solitude (“If survival is too much to hope for, one can hope to bleed out in near silence”). This masterpiece of morbidity is not to be missed. (June)