"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." - Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2

Little, Big is a book about a mystical wedding in the tradition of the alchemists. In the lore of the alchemists, marriage symbolizes the harmonization and synthesis of opposites. The sulphureous Red King weds his Silver Queen and, through the union of opposing energies, births the all-powerful philosopher's stone. In Little, Big you will find these and other archetypal figures, uniting, loving, fighting, and woven into a dream-like Tale about the intergenerational affairs of humans and fey, men, and women, town and country (and not to mention a faerie wedding). In bursts of noetic paragraphs, the author accomplishes a feat of synthesis more wonderous than any Heremetic mystery. As the title suggests, Little, Big is alchemy for the age of Eistein, a meditation on the relativity of time and space and the age old idea that the made-up world of consciousness that sits inside your head contains a bigger universe of possibilities than the actual universe around you. Everywhere, there are "smaller worlds inside of large", as the prose divides itself into subclauses, remarks, asides, and all of it as bountiful and generative as the fractal growing of a flower, or the embedded tale-within-a-tale structure of storytelling itself. Like love or madness, "The further in you went, the bigger it got." If Little, Big can tell a Tale of the universal and the human, the cosmic and the intimate, the Fairie and the State, it is because the metaphysical detective fiction unfolds through the vocabulary of a joyful, dreadful picaresque and the free, stream-of-consciousness mood and phrasing of a modernist masterpiece. It is, in a very stylistic sense, a marriage of two genres that, respectively, represent the depths of interiority and the heights of speculation, the future and the past, the High Art and the Little Stories: Modernism and Fantasy literatures. Readers who mourn the fate of Romantic attachments in a modern world will not find a pitying portrait, but real seekers of inner truth will recognize in the central family's saga the humanity with which the novel depicts the foibles of sensitive souls who seem to forget when they have slipped over into Dreamland. Like a traveler in a darken wood, the reader may feel led astray among their own palace of memories, and emerge from the book having been changed by it. A wonder, a masterpiece, five stars.

crabsolutely

crabsolutely