Overview
In 1902, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke arrives in Paris to write a study of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin, having left his wife and newborn daughter at home in the rural north of Germany. The bustling metropolis overwhelms the young poet, and the squalor of the Latin Quarter where he resides touches off a deep personal crisis. Not since Rilke's disastrous childhood has his world seemed so menacing and strange. Sorely disquieted by poverty, loneliness, quailing health, and fleets of dark memories, Rilke finds himself caught up in a powerful reckoning with his “unfinished childhood” and the tangled relationships that came from it--his wife and daughter clearly included. Spanning Western Europe from 1875 to 1917, Lost Son brings a brooding atmosphere and human complexity to an intimate, imaginative portrait of one of the most sensitive artists of his time. Rilke's odd childhood and difficult early life may have created the uncompromising determination that infuses his art. But was the moral cost too great? In this gorgeous new novel, M. Allen Cunningham brings alive the intellectual and artistic movements that shaped the 20th century and the personalities that made this history their own--from Rilke himself to the great master Rodin to the fascinating Lou Salome, mistress or confidant to Rilke, Freud and Nietzsche. The result is an exploration of the forever imperfect loyalties we face in life and the seemingly immeasurable distances that can separate life and art.Synopsis
In 1902, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke arrives in Paris to write a study of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin, having left his wife and newborn daughter at home in the rural north of Germany. The bustling metropolis overwhelms the young poet, and the squalor of the Latin Quarter where he resides touches off a deep personal crisis. Not since Rilke's disastrous childhood has his world seemed so menacing and strange. Sorely disquieted by poverty, loneliness, quailing health, and fleets of dark memories, Rilke finds himself caught up in a powerful reckoning with his unfinished childhood and the tangled relationships that came from it--his wife and daughter clearly included. Spanning Western Europe from 1875 to 1917, Lost Son brings a brooding atmosphere and human complexity to an intimate, imaginative portrait of one of the most sensitive artists of his time. Rilke's odd childhood and difficult early life may have created the uncompromising determination that infuses his art. But was the moral cost too great? In this gorgeous new novel, M. Allen Cunningham brings alive the intellectual and artistic movements that shaped the 20th century and the personalities that made this history their own--from Rilke himself to the great master Rodin to the fascinating Lou Salome, mistress or confidant to Rilke, Freud and Nietzsche. The result is an exploration of the forever imperfect loyalties we face in life and the seemingly immeasurable distances that can separate life and art.
Publishers Weekly
Cunningham follows The Green Age of Asher Witherow(2004) with a dense novelization of the life of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. An account of Rilke's baptism gives over to a chronicle of his time in Paris, where he ruminates on life and befriends sculptor Auguste Rodin. From Rodin's residence, the narrative episodically follows Rilke from his days as a sickly military cadet and his meeting the writer Lou Andreas-Salome—his muse with whom he travels widely—to an interlude with Lord Chamberlain's skeleton in a crypt and eventually to the double heartbreak of Rilke's father's death and his final parting with Rodin, which inspires the poet to wall himself away behind his writer's desk. Cunningham is a talented writer, although unwelcome shifts into second-person and passages rife with adjective abuse mar this ambitious undertaking. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationEditorials
Publishers Weekly
Cunningham follows The Green Age of Asher Witherow(2004) with a dense novelization of the life of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. An account of Rilke's baptism gives over to a chronicle of his time in Paris, where he ruminates on life and befriends sculptor Auguste Rodin. From Rodin's residence, the narrative episodically follows Rilke from his days as a sickly military cadet and his meeting the writer Lou Andreas-Salome—his muse with whom he travels widely—to an interlude with Lord Chamberlain's skeleton in a crypt and eventually to the double heartbreak of Rilke's father's death and his final parting with Rodin, which inspires the poet to wall himself away behind his writer's desk. Cunningham is a talented writer, although unwelcome shifts into second-person and passages rife with adjective abuse mar this ambitious undertaking. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Cunningham's second novel (after The Green Age of Asher Witherow) focuses on poet Rainier Maria Rilke's life at the turn of the 19th century, when he was involved with international beauty Lou Andreas-Salomé and then married sculptor Clara Westhoff. Rilke travels to Paris to research a book on Auguste Rodin and stays at the artist's studio, leaving his wife and baby daughter behind in Germany. Inspiration and poetry come to Rilke suddenly and inexplicably, leaving him groping to adjust to his own genius. He wanders Europe, desperately seeking time and space for his creative energies to emerge and battling illness, as always. He is inspired to write a novel, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the tale of a young man in pursuit of life and meaning. Cunningham's novel follows Rilke up to World War I, when he begins work on the Duino Elegies, and touches on his service in the Austrian army. Far from totally sympathetic or heroic, Rilke emerges as a strange, hyperconscious, androgynous specter in a bizarre world. Cunningham has taken risks, attempting to paint Rilke in the poet's own words and style, and he has succeeded in producing an offbeat and absorbing literary work. Recommended for larger fiction collections.
—Jim Coan