Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk’s deathbed visions. Othlo’s Dantean journey teaches him that sorrow is fleeting and salvation a matter of perspective. A Boschian vision quest—this masterpiece of morbidity is not to be missed.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In the exhilarating final volume of Harald Voetmann’s trilogy, set in the eleventh century in the city of Regensburg, Othlo of St. Emmeram takes a journey through Heaven and Hell
Spurning carnal desire and earthly temptations all his life, the mystic Othlo is now in the care of his brother monks, including the odious Wolkbart. Despite the spare walls which surround his sickbed, Othlo frolics with Holy Dionysius in the Garden of Head-bearers (each carries his own head for eternity), descends from the island of Heaven, visits a brothel patronized by fallen angels who spawn nightmarish offspring eternally, and witnesses the souls of the once gluttonous wealthy fighting over scraps of rotting crabmeat in a ditch in Hell. Accompanied by a sinister guide and a three-hoofed lamb, our hero sees things that make Hieronymsous Bosch’s hellscape look like a rose garden.
The third and final book in a series about mankind’s desire to conquer nature, Visions and Temptations follows Awake and Sublunar. In each novel, a great if imperfect mind faces the inevitable demise of the body.
Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk’s deathbed visions. Othlo’s Dantean journey teaches him that sorrow is fleeting and salvation a matter of perspective. A Boschian vision quest—this masterpiece of morbidity is not to be missed.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful. You will never read anything like Awake—a hardcore, pulsating portrait of a first century Roman weirdo. A wonderful and unpleasant treasure.
— Olga Ravn
Visceral and lyrical, entertaining and provoking, Voetmann evokes a dazzling world.
— Sjón
Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel—or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves—each scarcely more than a hundred pages— are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendor.
