Synopsis:

A great American city is destroyed under mysterious circumstances. A lone survivor wanders through its ruins. Out of a wind-tossed wreckage of language appear images of a young, half-orphaned boy, of a perplexed, yet idealistic, student, of a disillusioned, bitter middle-aged man dreaming of lives he might have led, had he chosen differently in early manhood; and of a comatose old man in a hospital ICU, lonely, paralyzed, and dying – and half-seen visions of an adolescent girl, a young woman, an old woman, alone, lost, and abandoned, longing, in an ever-renewed and frustrated search for love.

Publisher's description: "Working in the tradition of Joyce, Pynchon, Beckett, the 'New Novel,' and other important modernist and postmodernist innovators, Bernard has fashioned a unique blend of powerful storytelling, linguistic mastery, and profound moral and spiritual insight, a wild journey into the heart of darkness of the madness of our times.

"Described by the author as an 'antinovel, a novel turned inside out, like a sock,' 'a story of the discovery of identity causing its immediate dissolution' and 'a coming-of-age story in which there is no coming of age,' A Spy in the Ruins is a permanent addition to the literature of challenge and subversion, a book for the twenty-first century."

"... magnificent ... the best modern American novel since those by Thomas Pynchon and William Gass." - Juan Goytisolo, author of Count Julian and A Cock-Eyed Comedy

" ... an extraordinary literary experiment." - Anna Sears, author of Exile

" ... an invasion of Joycean territory with banners waving and sentences aflame.... a book for those who cherish consciousness and who wonder whatever happened to it." - Jack Foley, author of O Powerful Western Star and The Dancer and the Dance

Book Excerpt:

It hit tilting the room on its edge and rattling it vertically like a fierce knocking on a door then the shortest of breaks a moment on the lip before dropping it into a long lateral ferocious shaking like a bone in the mouth of a dog books slithering from a case the phone falling to the floor CDs slipping from the shelves as the kitchen rang with breakage the room’s frame creaked and squealed around you torquing in the ground roll as p-wave followed by s-wave (lucid enough to remember your geology) but the s-wave kept shaking cracking the plaster across from you as you crouched in the doorway the doorframe bending the door almost swinging out something booms far below the building had been raised on a big square of concrete you imagine the long diagonal fork of black lightning split its face yet you feel almost calm as if riding a wave as you used to do when a child throwing yourself into the curl of the surf crashing toward the foam of waves already spent in a chug of spume and froth and it keeps rolling the tall apartment building across the street swaying gently like a giant cradle as you saw the squares of transparency fall like large glassy snowflakes from the building’s face and you realized it was windows falling and you heard the squish and rattle of the rain of shattering glass along the street and the rolling seemed to go on endlessly endlessly endlessly until as abruptly as it had hit it stopped.

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Author Comment:

A Spy in the Ruins is not my first novel, but it is my first published novel. It is also the book of mine that, had I the choice (and it seems, miraculously, that I had!), I would wish to leave behind; the one work of mine I would wish you to read. It sums up much of my aesthetic and much of my philosophy. It is both my paean to, and my critique of, this dubious thing called human life. Indeed, it sums me up. Moi, je suis the Spy - to say nothing of the ruins!

Topics/Categories:

Antinovel, Experimental

Type of Work:

Novel

Publishers:

Regent Press

Original Publish Date:

06/21/2005

ISBNs:

1-58790-111-0

Formats:

Paperback