The Desire Notebooks

By John High

Fiction. A finalist for the 1999 Heacon Award, THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS constructs, through three brilliantly realized apercus, one woman's confrontation with death and its threads of self- and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1881471330
• ISBN13: 9781881471332
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The Desire Notebooks: A Work of Eros

Allegra Wong ah@meganet.netJohn High's novel is a memorial triptych for a lover and soul-mate. Landscape, intense longing, eros, her slow dying, and his sorrow blend and become one. THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS achieves for John High the true vision of an author-to painstakingly extract lessons, morals, and insights from his soul and transpose them to text. He tells the story of the Russian struggle of inner life not only through his central protagonists but also through the forsaken landscape. The central characters and their honed interior longings, reflected in the stark and sprawling landscape of Siberia, give the book intellectual depth and weight. The prose is precisely rendered. It is intelligent, sensitive, and passionate writing in the tradition of Pessoa, Duras, Figes, Cortazar, Maso, and Calvino."Sitting so close and only touching...He wanted to lay her down and enter her. Immediately. Possess her. Instead he went to the toilet and glanced out the window. His ghost like her ghost...Later when he told her of his masturbation, she suggested it was only male heat, intoxication, a restlessness... It came to her in the next day that if she stopped her meditation, perhaps she could let him possess her. The way a man wants to possess a woman. But she masturbated in the public latrine in order to sustain the desire while keeping him distant and fluent in her imagination. That way she thought...the absence of a personal history would better suit him on the next journey...[then] her stroking him from behind on the thigh, saying-it's all right now. We should sleep together."It is desire. "If one has not known the passion which takes this form, physical desire, one knows nothing," said Duras. It is a tumultuous desire, balanced between her living and dying, inextricable from her dying; a desire calling the central characters down thoroughfares to spiritual parts of themselves, permitting them to see their eternal selves waiting.It is obsession, the central characters' obsession with wisdom and with each other, and with their need to listen to each other, suffer, console, kiss, caress."The truth of her death would suggest more, yet he could not comprehend it. Anymore than he could understand the dreams A doubling of his own past. A sky, whitened out like snow. Like a page. A vanishing countryside. And more wine as they traveled on their way. A history once overlooked is not forgotten, she said, shaking his arm and kissing him. Reveal facts, buried feelings...is this what she had whispered when he touched the blackness on her throat?"High's novel is a work of eros-subtle, challenging, unpredictable, and at the same time, empowering with emotions and passion, and infusing all aspects of human life.It is violence:"Read me more, she had beseeched him on the trains. Read me more she begged after he placed his coat around her naked shoulders, carried her away from the men who were still pulling up th