She could see forever, and everywhere she looked, she saw God's love.'' She became an ember carried upward by the heat of an invisibleįlame. ''Pure awareness stripped her of everything. all edges and points,'' until a strange light burns through and all heaven breaks loose. ''Lying Awake'' is, like the life it portrays, a quiet, stubborn movement against the postmodern grain.Ĭloistered in the heart of secular Los Angeles, Sister John of the Cross has spent most of her life laboring toward God but has only recently found an entry point: a series of blinding headaches that leave her ''splintered like broken glass Or men.'' This must qualify as the last word in austerity programs, and, paradoxically, it has produced a singularly rich and abundant work, and one that plays by its own rules. no matter how tightly Salzman binds the ropes, he isĪble to extricate himself each time, swimming away on a stream of easy language.īut then he has never fettered himself quite so intently as this: his new novel, ''Lying Awake,'' is the story of a Carmelite nun who has spent 28 years ''in a world without television, radios, newspapers, movies, fashion Of his memoir ''Iron & Silk,'' the Buddhist monasteries and classical music circles of his novel ''The Soloist''. Yale-educated Houdini, Mark Salzman has made a career of locking himself inside closed societies and wriggling free. A novel about a nun tormented to find that her epiphanic visions have a biological cause.
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