...a hermit, a shadow, and a madman travel across a strange desert on a strange journey. near the end of his journey, the hermit will be tempted by a mysterious woman. along the way, the shadow decides he wants to become a man and so is instructed by his master the hermit to observe one: he chooses to observe a sculptor...a sculptor crosses rooftops to be with a mysterious woman who lives in a strange room, its walls covered by pinned and dying butterflies. near the end of his journey, he becomes convinced that this mysterious woman is betraying him with the moon. by day he sculpts a statue of a young king; by night he dreams of this conquering king...
a young king conquers death and then all of the world; he becomes known as the Moon King and will eventually fight his last battle with a dragon who guards a strange gate. near the end of his journey, a mysterious temple handmaiden comes to him and he will try to ravish her. at night he dreams of strange figures, crossing a strange desert...
Alfie, what's it all about?
i dunno, not really. i was reminded of the film The Saragossa Manuscript (sadly, i have not read the book). stories expanding and then folding in on themselves. a moebius strip, an ouroboros. the separate tales connect in strange and mysterious ways, both figuratively and literally. they come together, they come apart, they come back together. the stories talk to each other. the hermit, the sculptor, and the king all leave their worlds. for what? for englightenment, in search of a higher love and a greater desire, maybe to conquer all. the material world is simply a place of furniture and refuse; striving towards a higher plane is the only true goal - but even that can be corrupted. it will always be corrupted.
just ask the freckle-faced boy with the runny nose... he tells his tribe about this new second sun and what they should do about it, what new goals they should strive towards. they respond by stoning him to death. later, they raise him up as their martyred Great Seer and use his words as a basis to conquer all. in time mankind will fear his very name. huh? yes.
the shadow is my favorite. winsome & earnest & chilling & amusingly deadpan.
Mojmir Drvota is a Czech writer, apparently living in the U.S. at the time of Triptych's publication by The Cauldron Press in 1980. he wrote an earlier novel called [b:Solitaire|4755845|Solitaire|Mojmir Drvota|/assets/nocover/60x80.png|4820562]. both are real obscurities and i could find pretty much no information on either one. alas!
the author has genuine skill in creating dreamscapes, in mining archetypes and in using the logic of dreams to expand upon those archetypes. his prose is masterful, moving easily from stark fable to enchanting fantasy to absurd anachronism to arch pedantry (the last appears in the penultimate chapter - a tongue-in-cheek thesis on various characters and a statue from the preceding "narrative").
here is the opening and closing of the novel's Prologue:
there is a pair of scissors. they will stop a king from ravishing a handmaiden; they will be used by a sculptor to murder his mistress; they will be found plunged in a hermit's heart.Through the dark forest toiled a pack of beings. They advanced with the faltering steps of the blind. Their backs were laden with massive burdens the size of original sin or stone tumuli...
They plodded on in silence, for there were no words, there was nothing to name and there was nobody to speak to - there was no other. The pack was a single body with a multitude of heads and limbs. Hence no one walked in front as the first among them all. Only the body of the pack wound its way through the labyrinth of darkness.
And the forest itself was nothing but a turmoil of writhing masses which enveloped one another, bit into one another, then slowly and insensibly swallowed one another, and so mutually maintained themselves in a balanced state of cold ebullition. Lost in the depths of this havoc, the pack of beings toiled on, staggering under the weight of their burdens.
trippy, man, trippy. i tripped out on Triptych.
