Island of the Mad

October 10, 2016
In her follow-up to A Monster’s Notes, Sheck again channels the voice of a disfigured protagonist to create this novel that reads like a lucid dream. Told in short chapters composed of choppy paragraphs, the book starts with reclusive Ambrose A. at his menial job electronically archiving old books, somewhere in America. In a break from routine, one day he receives a letter from a coworker he’s never spoken to asking him to go to Venice in search of a mysterious notebook. Although he is hunchbacked and suffers from a rare medical condition that causes his bones to break easily—such as by walking through the city—Ambrose embarks to the Venetian Lagoon and San Servolo, the “Island of the Mad,” where he begins to have visions of Frieda, a young woman who lived through the Venetian plague of 1557. Heavy with allusions to Russian authors Dostoyevski, Turgenev, and Bulgakov—Frieda is a character from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—Sheck’s book takes up weighty themes such as perspectivism and the nature of time by considering 16th-century Venice through the eyes of writers and artists who found themselves in the city. Although the book can feel repetitive, with colors and motifs repeating themselves ad nauseam, the book’s insularity is also one of its strengths. Sheck pulls readers through the time-worm canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike.

October 1, 2016
A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse.And how might all that hang together, you ask? In Shecks second novel (A Monsters Notes, 2009), tenuously, though its lyricism softens its digressive style. The narrator, Ambrose, is a hunchbacked man who once toiled scanning books, and an unnamed former co-worker has sent him a letter beckoning him to visit her in Venice to help her locate a notebook that might shed light on an illness thats made her sleepless. From there, things get woolly: Ambrose dreams of encounters with Pontius Pilate and the Italian painter Titian, receives more letters thick with references to Bulgakovs novel The Master and Margarita, then discovers a notebook by an epileptic man who read to an ailing woman from Dostoevskys The Idiot. The story is salted with historical anecdotes about Venices suffering during a 16th-century plague (the title refers to a quarantine site near the city), and early on Ambroses trip there suggests a literary detective story. But the novel ultimately becomes too free-wheeling in plot and language to hew to such convention. Chapters are usually a page long and often as brief as a sentence, expressing sorrow and loss but without much characterization or context to make those expressions substantive. (Her sleeplessness carried her into a vulnerability that grew oddly beautiful and porous even as it filled with struggle.) What Sheck means to get at, in an abstract and indirect way, is the way loneliness and distance persist through the ages, both in life and literature, and how we might be able to transcend it through words. No question, theres a rhythmic force to Shecks repeated tropesswatches of red cloth, grim plague journals, the complexities of the space-time continuum. But one also feels that, for all the book's innovation, a lot of time-folding storytelling and dour invocations are serving a well-worn truism about our being alone in the universe. A brash but overly tangled poetry-prose hybrid.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2016

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and author of the reverberant A Monster's Tale, a rethinking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act. Her protagonist, a hunchback named Ambrose, physically fragile but mentally robust, is prompted by a mysterious missive to run off to Venice in search of a lost notebook. Past and present, history and literature all blend as Ambrose encounters Pontius Pilate, his unfortunate dog, the artist Titian, a lovely young woman named Freida convicted of murder in the past century, and characters from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In addition, there are frequent scenes of Venice during the terrible 1575 plague, as doctors with their distinctively beaked plague masks swoop through the text. Finally, Ambrose arrives at San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, where an abandoned hospital has been turned into a conference center. There he finds papers from two former inmates that further complicate his quest. VERDICT A dizzyingly inventive work that reveals a strong sense of human connectedness; highly recommended for anyone who doesn't want just plot.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016
Ambrose lives patiently with a cruel affliction that causes his bones to easily break and that has burdened him with a large hump, yet when his coworker in a small basement room where they scan books for digitization, a silent, sleepless woman, leaves him a note, asking him to go to Venice to search for a notebook, he does so. As in A Monster's Notes (2009), poet and poetic novelist Sheck draws on classic worksher characters are obsessed with Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margaritato create an exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche. Ambrose, so tenderly portrayed, finds himself in a city as fragile in its underpinnings as he is, where he is steeped in books; assailed by ghostly voices, including that of the painter Titian; and awash in tragic accounts of the plague years and the scourge of epilepsy. In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)