The Desire Notebooks

Abstract, vivid and difficult, this harrowing first novel from PW contributing editor High (The Sasha Poems) combines metaphysical speculation with attention to the landscape and religion of Russia. High's three segments--entitled ""The Book of Mistranslations,"" ""A Face of Desire"" and ""The Monks Overlooking the Story""--describe the recurrence and survival of human desire under the most adverse conditions. Fragments of letters, dialogues, prose poems and descriptive passages bleed into one another to follow a pair of young lovers and a pair of monks, whose travails, though focused on the present, take place over a 1000-year arc of Russian history. The unnamed lovers suffer extreme deprivation in the metaphysical Siberia of contemporary Russia, a place defined by cold, cancer, morphine and nausea. Struggling to stay together, trying to connect through body, word and writing, the lovers are sustained in their secular journey by the monks Peter and Ezekiel, who, High suggests, have been repeatedly reincarnated, always looking for ways to heal each other's pain. An epigraph from Simone Weil resonates with other gnomic prose throughout the novel, invoking an unseen, perpetually ramifying ""event"" all human beings must choose to accept. Often poetic to the point of hermeticism, High's prose can seem unpolished or pretentious, not quite able to hold together its narrative. At the same time, readers may respond to High's spiritual and intellectual ambition, his accurately conveyed desire to make a novel tell the story of love and death, always and everywhere. One form of clarity is provided by photographs throughout, never before released from the Sovfoto/Eastfoto Archives. (Oct.)