- Hardcover: 720 pages
- Publisher: The Lilliput Press Ltd (21 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1901866688
- ISBN-13: 978-1901866681
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 5.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 508,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Nostos: An Autobiography
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Product Description
Product Description
The author feels he was lost and this is a narrative describing how he fights his way to a kind of rest at the heart of things as they terribly and resplendently are. This volume give biographical grounding to the early mythical philosophical works of John Moriarty.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a marvellous book. It is a compendious look at life. At the darkness as well as the light. John Moriarty tells us the story of his journey inwards and outwards and downwards. It is a biography of re-birthing and re-imagining, of dark nights of the soul and of tender intimacy. Ulimately this fascinating book tells the story of one man's journey of struggle and some kind of acceptance. It is a book for dipping into and savouring, rather than trying to read at one go. A bit like Joyce's Ulysses, this book is mythic in every sense of the work. Everything is grist to the mill of his thought.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Maddening, mystifying, mythical apologia pro vita sua
25 Feb 2006
Format:Hardcover
One of the longest and certainly one of the most diffused books I have read. It reminds me of other Irish eccentrics, Denis Johnston and Francis Stuart, who also kicked against the pricks of an earlier 20c Irish conservatism and Christianity to, amidst the wreckage of that century, construct their own alternative mentality. They wrote in a prose style that refused to stand still or sit down. Like Johnston and Stuart, Moriarty can not fit in to the society that invites him to remain as a lecturer, a gardener, or a lover of one woman or one place. He roams from his native North Kerry where he was born at the end of the 1930s to Greece, Dublin, Leeds, Mexico, Manitoba, across the Arizona desert, to 1960s Haight-Ashbury, back to Canada, over to Connemara, and into Kildare and Wicklow as the story, not really the autobiography that its subtitle indicates, subsides around the mid-1970s. Some of the best passages, about his mother's death, a Native American tale of Mouse, and of his father's few but telling words to his wandering son, are right near the end.
While I along with Moriarty wondered aloud, long before he did on p. 300 of this 698 pp. tome, if he'd finally wearied of the same unending questions, the pace is set by him and we must keep up, out of respect and adventure if not comfort or complacency. This book is as grueling as a long slog through the decades of one man's mind, more an inner journey than one easily linked to years and fixed by names or limited to locales. While it has these all at times, its true encounters are as enigmatic and as powerful as those of Jacob as he wrestled--with himself, with an angel, with a demon, with a god, with God--at Bethel. To his credit, Moriarty likewise refuses the easy explication. He never has the Paul on the road to Damascus encounter I feared and expected him to find by the end of his millions of words here, and thank whatever deity or lack of such revelation, for that stubborn and honest fidelity.
This book spirals, in that old Celtic sense. Moriarty constantly circles around key passages from Melville, Pascal, the Book of Job, 19 and 20c scientists, and many myths to elaborate his own fusion of a post-Christian/classically informed/globally aware spiritual and intellectual project. He wants to admire the mountain itself, he says, not the Moses or the Mohammed who came to the mountain with laws and dogma.
If you looked at a page of this book at random, the shamanistic repetition, the invocations, the interruptions and the recriminations would appear as part-sense, part-ravings. But Moriarty, despite his formidable learning, his defiant and curly mane, and his considerable storytelling skills, is no madman on the bus next to you. This book demands attention and rewards introspection. I found myself impatient, intimidated, and irritated by it as much as I was inspired, informed, and impelled to re-examine my own muddled soul's reflection.
While I along with Moriarty wondered aloud, long before he did on p. 300 of this 698 pp. tome, if he'd finally wearied of the same unending questions, the pace is set by him and we must keep up, out of respect and adventure if not comfort or complacency. This book is as grueling as a long slog through the decades of one man's mind, more an inner journey than one easily linked to years and fixed by names or limited to locales. While it has these all at times, its true encounters are as enigmatic and as powerful as those of Jacob as he wrestled--with himself, with an angel, with a demon, with a god, with God--at Bethel. To his credit, Moriarty likewise refuses the easy explication. He never has the Paul on the road to Damascus encounter I feared and expected him to find by the end of his millions of words here, and thank whatever deity or lack of such revelation, for that stubborn and honest fidelity.
This book spirals, in that old Celtic sense. Moriarty constantly circles around key passages from Melville, Pascal, the Book of Job, 19 and 20c scientists, and many myths to elaborate his own fusion of a post-Christian/classically informed/globally aware spiritual and intellectual project. He wants to admire the mountain itself, he says, not the Moses or the Mohammed who came to the mountain with laws and dogma.
If you looked at a page of this book at random, the shamanistic repetition, the invocations, the interruptions and the recriminations would appear as part-sense, part-ravings. But Moriarty, despite his formidable learning, his defiant and curly mane, and his considerable storytelling skills, is no madman on the bus next to you. This book demands attention and rewards introspection. I found myself impatient, intimidated, and irritated by it as much as I was inspired, informed, and impelled to re-examine my own muddled soul's reflection.
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