Synopsis
"A man in his daughter's bed is a link out of the human chain," broods the King, a father who has irrevocably crossed the age-old boundary between parent and child. Brilliantly imagined and deftly executed, this provocative literary fable of lust and obsession is the tale of two sets of brothers, one of each pair blessed with beauty and grace and the other physically cursed; two mothers, one an icy queen of a frozen kingdom and the other obsessed with her thousands of birds; two riddles spun by a mysterious Persian; and Amalasuntha, the Princess whose father has placed her on top of a glass mountain to protect her from the lust of men, including his own. A taut and feverish tale of Oedipal tension and transformation that reverberates with the power of myth and folklore, The Glass Mountain is an astounding allegory for our time.
Publishers Weekly
The narrator, Prince Fat Klaus, leads us masterfully through an intensely imagined world in this surprising fable by poet and Gothic expert Wolf ( The Essential Dracula ). His quest is to retrieve Amalanthusa, a princess set on a glass mountaintop by her lustful father. This astounding tale begins and ends in a tower, where Klaus and his rival, hare-lip Fritz, wait out the night, their lives unfolding in stories replete with fairy-tale elements: a ``Witch of the Woods,'' an evil goat, a Persian soothsayer with a riddle. The interlocked stories, all organized around the search for the beautiful princess, are often told to us by other characters. Klaus's controlled irony makes the fable current and immediate: ``I was a huge, fat man who had failed to outwit disaster.'' Themes of passion and loss are authoritatively contained by this incisive narration. The prose moves quickly, hypnotically, Klaus's voice the engine behind it. His steed dies and he observes from the tower ``the sound of ravens busy with my horse. Their beaks made a distinct click . . . '' Wolf's characters try and fail, often overtaken by erotic longings: violent male characters battle for sleeping, sexualized women. The mechanism of interlocked tales serves the novel's compression: the glass mountain, the witch's woods, the Eastern bazaar--these worlds are superbly crafted in terse, bold, musical language. (Dec.)