Cadenza Book

Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world that was. First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic "excursion" of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and "orders out"—sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.

"One can only say that Ralph Cusack has a giant mind. And has seen enough horror in his time to write several bibles. . . . It's the first time I've ever had to put a book down out of fear of going on to find out what's going to happen." (J.P. Donleavy, Saturday Review)

"Beautifully written . . . bizarre and at times macabre." (Kirkus Reviews)

"On nearly every page is a cry and tumult of the earth and the sea's beauty and an enormous inconsequent humor. . . . His prose achieves a richness and greedy joy practically invisible in any literary works today." (Anthony Carson, London Daily Telegraph)

"It is—in capitals—A Work of Art." (New York Times)