THE SIEVE

A group of adventurers set out on a perilous journey to find a magic artifact—one that may be key to their survival in this debut historical novel.

During the French Revolution, the titular sieve—resembling a pair of large metal bowls on top of a square pillar—mysteriously appears to Monsieur Jean-Luc Descoulis, giving him the power to double whatever this magical item touches. While Descoulis sees the sieve as “the eraser of man’s burden,” his colleague Armand Dupuis notices that the copies created by the sieve grow progressively weaker: Pens don’t have as much ink, chickens are progressively skinnier and sicklier, and so on. Yet Descoulis sees it as a way for humans to live forever. Then the narrative leaps to the year 1964, when a group of men from wildly different backgrounds are drawn together for one common purpose: They intend to find the now-lost sieve, rumored to be somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. These adventurers include Grant Wyatt, a bitter archaeologist; Abram, an assassin; Jean-Michel Descoulis, a priest who spearheads the search; Cassius O’Mills, a former actor caught up in the Irish Republican Army; Ken, a floundering young man; Izuki, a depressed Japanese office worker; and Rod Arch, a disgraced former lawyer. While there is plenty of action to keep things moving, the story thrives on philosophical inner monologues interspersed with intense scenes of graphic violence (“Jaunito lay dead, the weight between his head and the table cracking the stick in half, blood with bubbles spurting and pooling over the table and floor”). Prenn favors a loose, stream-of-consciousness writing style—but this can prove challenging when it results in, for example, nine pages of prose with no paragraph breaks: “A blank spot in that vision, those mazes drawn on his apartment walls all paths to the same spot, his open window, where the unspeakable center would be....Time skips.” But those who relish digging into the ethical and religious ambiguities of deeply flawed humans will find enough substance here to stay engaged.

Dazzling and occasionally ponderous experimental fiction.