Monday, October 27, 2014

The Monk's Bible

The Monk’s Bible

THE MONK’S BIBLE
By Harold Billings
bill3
Photo by Zagava

Les Éditions de L’Oubli MMXIV

Previous ‘Les Éditions de L’Oubli’ in the modern age are shown here.

Previous reviews of all my purchased Zagava – Ex Occidente books are linked from here.

I shall report on my experience of this book in the comment stream below as and when I happen to read it.

It is a highly luxurious book, with 48 pages. “Limited to 100 numbered copies for sale, plus extra copies, which are reserved for private distribution.” Mine is numbered 10.

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 One response to “The Monk’s Bible” 

  1. “…but it will take me awhile to learn the names of this vast torrent of flowers and foliage. [...] A recent heavy rain came and the stream burst its banks…”

  2. This short story, as owl- or para-quel to A DEAD CHURCH, is wholly readable as a separate entity, with a plotted ‘envelope’ of a modern couple reading it as the commissioned translation of the marginalia in an ancient Bavarian Bible, transported, in the dark past of the earlier pre-quel, to the new world by migrants, a man and his gradually blind son and wife, leaving their daughters behind with their own imputed happy ending as our own modern couple in the ‘envelope’ may be forced to endure their own imputed happiness forever?

  3. The meat of this book, though, is the passage across the ocean in an old ship, and, later, the formation of the old church and its later downfall, by torrenting stream of both a flood of local superstition and a flooding out of the graveyard, fearing, as they passage across the oceans, even hoping, that their linked Bavarian ghosts and angels travel with them, including the blind son’s familiar …well, I can only tell you so much! Like the marginalist’s vision of his dead wife’s face as recurrent faces on such fleeting flying things, and like his fear for his blind son’s sexual health, and like much more.

  4. There is a definite feeling in me about this short story being substantial enough to form this thick-papered tome, one with its luxuriant stiffening and hedonist artistic context, ensuring we realise that the words are far more weighty and fateful and downright horrifying as they would be if they were, say, scribbled in its margins, more easily outlasting in meaning and physical survival most other books in this fragile world. But, believe me, the marginalist’s failure, in this book, to knot a ‘nostril link’ (something that I advisedly call a ‘ligottus’) is probably the centre of this whole growing mythology of the angel bird, this stiffening monumentality of happenstance, and other matters of which perhaps even the book’s headlease author may not realise the implications?

  5. Whatever your thoughts on its presentation, this is the genuine opening out or forced lifting of the lid of a weird fiction story that deserves the attention of those with the interest in such things and with the fortitude to withstand its implicatory monumentality as a classically disturbing, arguably anti-natalist, literary work.

  6. end



  • I have forgotten my exaggerated anti-natalist response!

    I took this photo today with such an angel bird following me on my regular morning walk by the seafront near where I live:
    ANGELBIRD
    It also roosted on the building below along the way but you can’t see it so clearly;
    angelbird2

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