Brilliance, Betrayal, Revenge, A Giant Humanoid Cat, Time Travel and a Love Story for the Ages
In Los Angeles, California, today, author Michael Shapiro announces the publication of My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge. With its groundbreaking structure, captivating plot and luminous style, this book connects readers with extraordinary worlds of the mind and the vast reaches of human imagination.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 26, 2006 -- In Los Angeles, California, today, author Michael Shapiro announces the publication of My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge. With its groundbreaking structure, captivating plot and luminous style, this book connects readers with extraordinary worlds of the mind and the vast reaches of human imagination.
In My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge, the author devises an intricate, storied diary that views the world through the eyes of an inimitable woman whose being and essence are determined by her superlative and penetrating intellect. Inspired by the great Japanese literature by upper-class women writers of the mid-Heian period, eighty-four masterfully woven sections alternate prose, poetry, social commentary and haiku-like vignettes to tell a fascinating tale of betrayal, revenge and undying love.
Cruelly and unjustly exiled, Lady Murasaki, accompanied by her consort, Prince Towa no Ai, is the virtuoso author of learned discourses on the Western literary heritage, especially the Divine Comedy and Provençal poetry. The narrator's skein moves the characters along a topography that has them migrating asynchronously between contemporary California and interwar Tokyo, Budapest and Moscow, ancient Israel and the medieval Romance world, Freiburg and New York, rural Alabama and Vermont.
Characters and chronologies are scrambled and reconstituted, real and imaginary events and places commingled, as Lady Murasaki brings her vast knowledge of art and literature to bear on explorations of medieval and Renaissance texts and the labyrinthine fictions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Her dialogues engage interlocutors that run the gamut from Satan and Pontius Pilate to Dante himself, as well as a giant humanoid cat. Through it all and to the end, including her final attainment of retributive justice, Lady Murasaki is wedded to Prince Towa no Ai, and it is their real-life love story that animates everything.
In a rare treat for readers, the concluding section, Postilla Epistolaria, takes a leaf from the Vita Nuova and chronicles the author's tortuous path in composing the work from inception to completion.
Published in conjunction with BookSurge, My Wife The Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge, is available through Booksurge and Amazon.
About the Author:
Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art. This is his first work of fiction.
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