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Synopsis
Maison Cristina immerses readers in an existential question: can the powers of storytelling and spiritual searching return to life a young woman sunken by mysterious wounds into a state of catatonia? In Maison Cristina Eugene K. Garber creates a dramatic bond between two memorable characters striving to redeem themselves from failure and suffering, a quest made arduous and uncertain by the deep wounds each has suffered in the past. The medium of their struggle is storytelling. Octogenarian Peter Naughton tells stories to youthful Charlene, narratives dark but paradoxically healing. And even as he spins his tales he must confront painful memories and a serio-comic demon who has haunted him from his youth.
Witnessing the process of redemptive remembering and telling are three nuns and an aide of strong faith who understand that the saving of a human self is fraught with struggle and uncertainty.
Two other inmates of Maison Cristina offer comic relief uncannily pertinent to the central themes of the novel. Ms. Trask, imagining herself a descendant of a great rail family and witness of her sister’s insanity, makes raucous assault on her mental and physical confinement. Mr. Gerrity struggles torturously to lift himself up from sloth-like inertia to articulate humanity.
The novel plunges readers into mysteries compounded of existential battles against darkness and heroic struggles to reach the light.
about the author
Eugene K. Garber is the author of seven previous works of fiction including The Eroica Trilogy based on a hypermedia webwork, EROICA, created with eight other artists. His fiction has won the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award and the William Goyen Prize for Fiction sponsored by TriQuarterly. His stories have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Revelation and Other Fiction from the Sewanee Review, The Paris Review Anthology, and Best American Short Stories.
Early Praise for Maison Cristina
Maison Cristina, Eugene K Garber, Transformations Press
Is there a special providence in the gift of gab? Can a teller of tales lift the scrim of trauma, restore to the self something akin to soul? In Garber's holy cuckoo's nest, an aging seafarer of formidable wit, bedeviled by his own noisome demon, agrees to treat with words alone a fellow inmate whose mute convalescence shrouds a mind unmoored. But if this reckoning with potentially divine materials is to be a talking cure, the healer must himself be healed. Thus the intellectual and spiritual stakes at the heart of this masterfully written and immensely entertaining novel.
Joe Amato, Author of Samuel Taylors Last Night
This brilliant novel introduces us to a dysfunctional man, Naughton, with a fountain of stories from his past, and tending to logorrhea, and Charlene, a woman who is tongue-tied in a close to catatonic state. The juxtaposition of these characters as they are trapped at either end of loquacity is an ingenious premise. Further, the novel is provocatively set in a world that seems to have taken Michel Foucault's insights in Madness and Civilization to heart. Here we experience how the telling of Naughton's stories gradually moves her out of her cocoon. But the real delight comes from the wit and economy of Garber's writing, as in all of his published prose. The high-level dialogs in the asylum of Maison Cristina bristle with quips, hidden agendas, and allusions. Read the book as an exploration of the power of stories to heal, or as an illustration of Foucault's relativistic view of mental illness, or just as a connoisseur of fiction writing at its best-you will be richly rewarded.
Joachim Frank, Author of Aan Zee and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
In previous novels by Garber, you enjoy at least one character who is a Paganini of language. In Maison Cristina, Peter Naughton, an octogenarian with a dark past, is our virtuoso. He sees horrific visions on the walls, for which he has been committed to Maison Cristina, a psychiatric institution run by nuns. Another patient, Charlene, a young woman unable to speak or to close her eyes, recalls a character in Garber's The House of Nordquist: Helene, the woman whose body and soul were to be transmuted into music. Both are emaciated, half dead, long suffering. In both novels, expression is expected to be salvific; music in The House of Nordquist, storytelling here. But there are remarkable differences. Maison Cristina has a unity of plot more organic than anything I remember having read by the master. Also, the nuns who run the psychiatric institution provide an aura of sacredness, especially Sister Claire, who, in her sessions with Naughton, offers pearls of thought-provoking spirituality like the following:
"There's the silent waiting for the voice of God. And there's the silence of abnegation."
Reading this book is a wonderful adventure of the spirit going back and forth among the living and the dead.
Ricardo Nirenberg, Author of Wave Mechanic: a Love Story and Editor of OffCourse