THE ALCHYMIST'S JOURNAL

by Evan S. Connell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 1991

From the prolific and talented Connell (Son of the Morning Star, etc.) comes a verbally breathtaking--but narratively almost inert--fictional collection of the thinking-aloud voices of alchemist/philosophers from the 16th and 17th centuries, when the medieval gloom of Faustian workshops crept toward the dawn of modern science. In A Long Desire (1979), Connell published a spellbinding essay on alchemy generally and on the Swiss experimenter and physician Paracelsus specifically, whose unhappy exiled and knowledge-seeking life (1493-1541) may itself have given rise to the Faust legend. Here, in a rage like King Lear's, the near-death Paracelsus starts things off with a magnificently sustained rant against his many academic and alchemical inferiors, along the way doling out his own flashingly intuitive prescientific beliefs (""It has become [man's] mission to dazzle the elements""). What follows, though, is only the faintest--oh, most faint--suggestion of a story as one thinker/alchemist after another delivers an interior monologue that seems as much as anything an endlessly undramatic and unrelentingly exhaustive medieval catalogue of the tenets, methods, limitations, precedents, and beliefs of the alchemical passion. Detail is here, in an abundance be-yong abundance, but the alluring clarities of setting and eventful narrative are not. One speaker is a monk, another a religious believer, another a skeptic, but each is only a voice, never fleshed or put in a visible setting or inside a perceptible event, and if their words rain down throughout like an incessant shower of gold (""Are men not eversible, predestined to off-set obnubilities? Yet are they favored with holy bones?""), it may still be pardonable for even the most assiduous reader to pant midway for air and wish for light at the end. Connell's more than encyclopedic knowledge, his unceasing stylistic wizardry (one section is a poem, gnomic yet splendidly powerful), and his sustained if not altogether clear purpose have resulted in a tour de force of extended prose so austere and unalloyed as to become almost hermetic. Brilliant but, however puzzlingly, inescapably tedious.

Pub Date: April 10, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: North Point

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION