Figures at the Threshold. A Novel in Fifteen Religious Conversions
In the spring of his seventy-eighth year, on the thirty-eighth floor of an aging Manhattan apartment building, a retired constitutional lawyer begins an inquiry he had not previously imagined himself making. Daniel Ferrara - Mexican-born, naturalized American since 1979, widowed three years, agnostic by lifelong settlement - has been moved by a friend's direct question and a podcast on political conversions toward a different question, older and more interior. What does it mean for a person to cross the threshold of a religion? What happens, in the body and the room and the hour, when the turn is made?
The book is what Daniel writes. Fifteen chapters, each centered on a single figure across the four hundred years that begin with Spinoza's herem in Amsterdam in 1656 and close with Arvo P rt's late-Soviet conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. Spinoza, Pascal, Heine, Mendelssohn, Newman, Huysmans, Claudel, Rosenzweig, Edward Conze, Schoenberg, Edith Stein, Simone Weil with Walter Benjamin, Graham Greene with Evelyn Waugh, Messiaen, P rt - the great converted and unconverted of the modern period, each compressed around the single hour or single day in which the public form caught up with the long interior substance.
Daniel's voice frames each chapter - at the beginning as he approaches the figure, at the end as he sets the figure down - in the apartment with the books on three walls, the photograph of an unidentified ancestor in the tallit on the bookshelf, and the listening chair by the north window where the sacred music plays in the evening. The interior of each historical chapter is rendered in third-person close on the figure: Pascal at his Paris desk while the fire arrives; Newman by the fire at Littlemore as the Italian Passionist comes in from the rain; Rosenzweig's foot on the threshold of the baptismal font on Yom Kippur 1913, and the turning around; the freezing barrack at Stalag VIII-A on January 15, 1941, when Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time received its first performance before four hundred prisoners and German guards.
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