Moth; Or, How I Came to Be With You Again

“Thomas Heise has written a deeply moving account of loss, migration, and memory that blurs the line between poetry and prose” (Montreal Review of Books).
 
The narrator in Thomas Heise’s adventurous novel tries to fuse together his present and past, abandonment by his parents, childhood in an orphanage, and a strong sense of disconnection from his adult life. The story is written in columnar, densely lyrical sections, looping and vertiginously dropping into the speaker’s past, across several cities in Europe. W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s films come to mind, especially L’Avventura and Red Desert. Heise’s language is precise (dirigibles “no larger than a fennel seed”) and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.
 
“Neither memoir, poem, nor novel, Moth is somehow all three—an effusive ramble through the space of language and the language of memory . . . Heise seems capable of doing anything with words.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“It’s impossible to convey in a few lines the enormous pleasures of this book—the beauty of the design, the incandescent prose, its rigor and intelligence. A deeply melancholic and moving work of art.” —Carole Maso, author of The Room Lit by Roses
 
“The silence between the words, between the pages is terrific.” —Michael Martone, author of The Blue Guide to Indiana