Lyrical, expressive, poetic - with his debut novel, author George Salis launches a reader into the sky where the sea and sun tumble above, below and every which way.
Sea Above, Sun Below is an astonishingly good novel - one reason to be astonished: George Salis' biographical blurb notes he wrote the book between the ages of twenty and twenty-three. That's crazy! Nearly all authors of literary works don't find their voice and hit their stride until later in life - obvious, somewhat akin to writers like Stephen Crane, Mary Shelley and Bret Easton Ellis, young George proves the exception.
Thanatos, so appropriate for the novel's opening chapter since Sea Above, Sun Below twirls and flips through the major themes of myth and literature going back to the ancient Greeks. Actually, in addition to thanatos, the first pages contain a good bit of eros - ah, eros and thanatos, love and death, skydiving and sky-spinning as when we read: "The most monotony skydivers ever put up with was the repetition of a cramped plane ride, akin to the clink clink clink of a rising roller coaster, until they could finally dive through the metal portal."
Such a spot-on metaphor we all can relate to as we recall our time on a roller coaster slowly mounting the highest hump before zooming down full speed- whoosh...wow! If you like vivid metaphors and similes, if you enjoy lingering and luxuriating over prose that's a close cousin to poetry, prose that can be read as a series of extended prose poems, then this, my friends, is your novel.
In addition to Greek mythology, there's oodles of references to the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as our modern, postmodern and post-postmodern era- all combined in the most engaging ways which goes along with the story unfolding from multiple points of view. For as critic and BookTuber Chris Via notes in his incisive introductory essay: "Characters look at the same thing and come away with different perspectives."
Take some deep breaths when you come upon a chapter entitled Cardiology, as per this snip, an exchange between our main character, a young gent by the name of Adam, and his father:
"Father."
This time he turned more hastily and opened his heterochromatic eyes to sync with a sigh, the leaden forest of his left iris read iridology and the red-clay cave of his right read ophthalmology. The high, too, was invariably linked with pulmonology. Within his father's didactic thirst was, not exactly a fear of death, but a fear of illness to the body. He was a hypochondriac who wished to rid himself of his corporeal form. "It'd be easier to live in just a mind," he once told Adam before he became a hermit in search of hermeticism. "No need to drink..." Hydrology. "No need to eat..." Gastronomy..." No need to sleep..." Polysomnography. "I just want to be aware."
"Aware of what," Adam had asked.
His father had put his hands on Adam's shoulders. "All of it."
All of it - in every one of the novel's forty chapters (as perhaps in forty days and forty nights!), I had the distinct feeling George Salis wanted all of it and wanted to share gulps of every single little bitty bit of life expressed in his most exuberant poetic language.
I'm hardly alone in my praise. Rikki Ducornet writes, "George Salis has an exhilarating gift. The overall breadth of the book, the cinematic quality, and the ease with which he juggles all the voices are terrific. It's masterfully orchestrated, vast in scope, and fearless."
And here's what novelist/reviewer L.P. Popovich has to say: "The novel works on multiple levels at once, guiding the reader through layers of meaning. It does not engage in hand-holding, nor is it like wandering a labyrinth. Reading it is like falling, which is a metaphor the novel makes ample use of, falling into a magical realm. The picture widens as you proceed, and the sky behind you is full of Halley’s comets, decaying gods, and past memories discarded like ballast."
Sea Above, Sun Below - for lovers of literature, a novel I can't recommend highly enough.
Lastly, the biographical blurb mentioned above also alludes to the author working on a maximalist novel these past few years. There's even a title given: Morphological Echoes. Now THAT, my friends, is a title where I can hear echoing all the way to Philadelphia. Move over Thomas Pynchon, move over David Foster Wallace, here comes George the maximalist Salis.
American author George Salis
Comments
Post a Comment