A SPY IN THE RUINS
A Novel
by Christopher Bernard
"... the greatest writer you have never read."
paperback / $24.95 / ISBN: 1-58790-111-0 / 543 pages / paperback / 7” x 10”
Fiction
ABOUT THE BOOK
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. The “debut novel” of the year, and the introduction to a national audience of its author, until now one of America’s best-kept literary secrets, A Spy in the Ruins portrays life in a society in turmoil, at war, divided and afraid, a world driven from its moorings, in quest of significance in a chaotic time – a world like our own, inhabited by people finding what purposes they can, in the creation of meaning out of the chaos of experience. Christopher Bernard’s novel, awaited by a small coterie of loyal readers for more than eight years, represents the climax of a literary career spanning three decades, in which his previous work in fiction, poetry, philosophy, and drama (produced in obscurity and known only to a small but ever-growing number of aficionados), finds its vindication in a book of enormous breadth, high passion, deep humanity, triumphant intellectual ambition, and dazzling linguistic invention. Working in the tradition of Joyce, Pynchon, Beckett, the “New Novel,” Juan Goytisolo, 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.
“From the ruins of the modern world, novelist Christopher Bernard [in A Spy in the Ruins] has cobbled together an elegant and elaborate work of fragments that beggars the imagination and soars every which way possible. The book begins with a handy quotation from Borges about identity and before long introduces the reader to the word “encrypted,” which offers a clue to the mysteries of language that lurk ahead. Bernard offers sentences of one word and sentences with dozens of words in an experimental tour de force that goes on for hundreds of pages in a metafiction that skirts silences. The book comes alive; entelechy and theology unite and dissolve; the plotless narrative makes bold excursions and undertakes riveting digressions. When a speaker asks “Where am I?” he seems to speak for the reader. And when he says “your turn” he stands his lexicon of love upside down and inside out and invites the audience to rewrite a tale that Shakespeare or William Faulkner might have said was full of sound and fury and told not by an idiot but by a mad genius.”—Jonah Raskin, author of Beat Blues San Francisco 1955
Christopher Bernard is a poet, essayist, and playwright as well as fiction writer. He has published work in Another Chicago Magazine, Permafrost, Ekphrasis and as a book reviewer for various periodicals and literary magazines. He is a cofounder of the literary and arts “zine” Caveat Lector and lives in San Francisco.
Other Books by the Author
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