|
|
Click for larger view |
A Novel by Philip Danze
Format: Hardcover, 192 pp. cloth
ISBN: 0-9671851-3-0
Pub Date: October 2001
Price: $23.00
Read the Reviews | Buy Now at Amazon
|
 |
Philip Danze grew up in Queens, where he attended parochial school and devoted himself to baseball. After being scouted three times (by the Cubs, Giants and Yankees), it looked like he would pursue a ball-playing career. But when the letter finally came asking him to report for spring training, Danze decided not to go. By then he had begun night classes at New York University (where Saul Bellow was one of his teachers and at a time when Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Philip Rahv were NYU fixtures and Dylan Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, Alfred Kazin, Max Eastman, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor were regular campus guests), and being on the periphery of a literary renaissance seemed more exciting than stretching a single into a double.
In addition to his college career, Danze worked for his father, a manufacturer of custom furniture, traveling extensively up and down the coasts of Central and South America in search of the exotic burl mahoganies and rosewood veneers that he and his father would use to create desks and breakfronts for the likes of David Rockefeller, LBJ's sister Rose, the staff of Adlai Stevenson (when he was Ambassador to the U.N.) and others.
Following marriage, Danze moved to Staten Island, where his two sons were born. Danze, who has worked as a professional copyeditor for over 30 years, now resides in Manalapan, NJ. CONJURING MAUD is his first novel.
|
In this deceptively simple tale, David Unger, an aging circus magician, recounts a life that is as rich in circumstance as it is deficient in reward. David's story begins in the late 1800s in Colonial West Africa. Africa is being raped at the time, for its diamonds, its gold, and its territories. Even David's father falls prey to the pillage, giving up his medical profession to mine for gold--an event which leads David's mother to abandon the family while David is still very young. Thus it is not surprising that David, a scrupulous observer of the greed and folly around him, should become obsessed--some years later when he is attending a naval academy on the island of Fernando Po--with Maud King, a forlorn British explorer and ethnologist who is entirely devoted to the beauty and soul of the continent and its people--and who is 16 years David's senior.
Against a background that is so diligently described that one can hear the Colobus monkeys chattering in the trees and see the steamy vapors rising off the Sanaga River, David's life unfolds: The reader attends his conscription into the British Army during the Zulu Rebellion, his work under--and friendship with--Bapu (Gandhi), his capture and astonishing escape from a cave prison created by a Zulu tribe, and, later, his training--in both medicine and magic--in England. (Although from his earliest years David had believed that the path he was placed on would eventually lead him into the medical profession, his experiences in West Africa--and, perhaps, too, the sorrows of his heart--reveal to him the utility of magic as well.)
While David's strange and sometimes erotic relationship--which spans two continents and several years--with the elusive Maud provides the principal focus in this mesmerizing first novel, other intrigues are as numerous and as irresistible as the Sanaga's tributaries. A mad French trader, a phantom black-market poacher, a medicine man who extracts sacrifices as payment for his protection, and an outcast who can't stop laughing at the misfortunes of others are only some of the enthralling characters whose paths David's crosses.
Like the best of David Unger's magic tricks, CONJURING MAUD offers more than meets the eye. Told in a style that is understated and elegant, it can be read for the pure pleasure of its fluidity and its ability to so completely transport the reader into another place and time. But readers will marvel too that beyond the author's subtle sleight of hand lies an imaginative portrayal of the longings of the spirit and the triumphs of the heart.
And…
"CONJURING MAUD ventures deep into the jungles of a bygone world, using a highly evocative level of nuance and detail. It's as if the author had actually lived in 19th century colonial Africa. But his sensitivities are modern; the novel's themes of personal freedom, geopolitical tragedy and unrequited passion all ring with relevance today."
--Soren Larson, Senior Editor, Details magazine
"An absorbing, well-crafted adventure in the classic style, CONJURING MAUD evokes the tumult and romance of turn-of-the-century colonial Africa with intelligence and feeling."
--Aaron Gell, Senior Features Editor, W magazine
"Reminiscent of Conrad and Kipling, CONJURING MAUD is lyrical, with arrestingly beautiful moments."
--Kate Hambrecht, Books Editor, Jane magazine
"CONJURING MAUD is so charmingly stated, so filled with telling and exciting incidents, and so replete with distilled wisdom that one is both saddened that reality doesn't contain more tales like this and delighted to see how high the human heart can quest."
--Jim Feast, Reviewer for American Book Review and New York Press
|
|
|
