Once in a long while, appears a writer who is, “literally,” extra-ordinary. Less extraordinarily, the works of such writers are routinely published to deaf ears: Before
Moby Dick
, Melville had scored two popular successes with tales of adventure on the South Seas. His finest work, spurned by contemporary American readers, was a commercial failure. Ironically, the high place now occupied by Melville’s American classic is vindicated--perhaps inadvertently--in the name brand of a highly popular and successful billion-dollar corporate retailer of coffee beverages. Ironically again, the hugely successful
Catcher In The Rye
was cited in self-defense of a failed presidential assassin.
One moral of the story: In the near term, commercially unsuccessful books fail to gain the readers they may deserve; in the long, successful ones deserve the readers they get.
Irony and Obscurity, first cousins to the recluse, Truth, are no strangers to J Lilly. True to his roots, Lilly has “leveraged” his training in the Greek and Roman classics into a latter-day version of the Greco-Roman literary farce, which numbers post-classical practitioners as varied as Swift and Nabokov. (Contrary to received wisdom,
Lolita
and
Gulliver’s Travels
are not stories about or for children.)
Wise Hyenas
is a very novel ghost story for very mature readers, told from multiple points of view monitored by a Julio-Claudian observer of present-day American mores.
is not a book for the culturally myopic or inattentive, the neo-puritanically moral, the artistically invertebrate, the politically punctilious, the merely legally sane. Nor is it a book for alt-Kultur reactionaries with a reflexive preference for a mythopoeic American Paradise Lost. It is a book for the studiously wise, weary of a voyeuristic society, in which the distinction between licentiousness and liberty has been perilously and perversely obscured.
Caveat lector—Let the reader beware. She is about to enter a free-spin zone.
Cover art work entitled Miro Scultore, by Joan Miro