Fiction Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-52-2
6 x 9 / 480 Pages / $15.95 / April 2008
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-932961-34-8 / ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-34-8
6 x 9 / 304 Pages / $24.95 / April 2007
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
Spanning western Europe from 1875 to 1917 and presenting a gothic historical Paris that subverts our old assumptions regarding the City of Light, M. Allen Cunningham’s new novel brings a brooding atmosphere and human complexity to an intimate and imaginative portrait of one of the most uniquely sensitive artists of his time, a poet whose odd childhood and difficult early life will both fascinate and perhaps help explain his determination to stay true to his artistic vision at almost any cost. Here is Rainer Maria Rilke in the grip of his greatest artistic struggle: life itself.
Rilke’s gripping emotional drama as child, lover, husband, father, protégé, misfit soldier, and wanderer is framed by a haunted young figure, a researcher who, a century later, feels compelled to trace Rilke’s itinerant footsteps and those of Rilke’s fictional alter ego, the bewitched poet Malte Laurids Brigge. The result is an exploration of the forever imperfect loyalties we face in work and life, the seemingly immeasurable distances that can separate life and art, and the generational tensions between masters and admirers.
"How wonderful to open a novel by an author you do not know, and to feel gradually, in joy and astonishment, the magic of Rilke reach out from every page. LOST SON is at once a subtle and signal imaginative achievement, putting readers on notice: an extraordinary talent has come upon the scene." —Ihab Hassan
"The merits of the novel are many and they cast a spell. Cunningham's rigorous and thoughtful organization ensures that the spell never slides into slush." —The Bloosmbury Review
"With beautifully expressive prose, M. Allen Cunningham is able not only to evoke the poet's angst, but also to get the reader to empathize with it....you'll want to savor every word. I found myself buying Cunningham's previous novel and starting to read Rilke's poems." —Sue Asher, Historical Novels Review
"Rainer Maria Rilke's poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' is about the intense feeling inspired by the fragment of an ancient sculpture he discovered in the Louvre. Great art throws down a gauntlet: 'There is no piece of this that does not see you. You must change your life.'
Rilke responded to that challenge with a fierce, uncompromising loyalty to art. Forsaking family and health, he became the greatest lyric poet of the 20th century. His strange autobiographical novel, 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,' explores the abyss of man's interior life and solitude, sounding what would become a dominant theme in modern art. He wrote forcefully about artists Auguste Rodin and Paul Cezanne. He composed two cycles of poems, 'The Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Orpheus,' in sudden bursts of creative energy that he claimed came to him as a gift, unbidden, with the spontaneity of automatic writing. And he wrote 'Letters to a Young Poet,' a passionate, romantic book that has inspired a will to change in many readers -- although the change from what to what is almost never as clear, or as dedicated, as it was in Rilke's case.
But Rilke does inspire idolatry. Stephen Spender said that if Rilke cut himself shaving he would bleed poetry. John Banville recently remarked that the poet's 'admirers are convinced that it is to them alone that he speaks, and that they alone can hear the true voice.'
Certainly one of these admirers is Portland writer M. Allen Cunningham, whose new novel 'Lost Son' is a fictional biography of Rilke, an attempt to re-imagine the poet's inner experience and character: 'his impressions, fears, ambitions, failures, friendships, and triumphs.'
Rilke's life (1875-1926) was odd enough to sustain narrative curiosity. Raised among the German-speaking minority of Prague, Rilke's 'unfinished childhood' was haunted by his family's memories of a sister who died before he was born. His mother coddled him, dressing him in girls' clothes until he started school, and then, at age 10, his father enrolled him in a military academy, where he was thoroughly miserable. Somehow the damaged child forged himself into a poet of indomitable spirit. He married the sculptress Clara Westhoff, with whom he had a daughter, Ruth.
But he rarely lived with them. Instead he drifted through many affairs, including a strange relationship with the enigmatic Lou Andreas-Salome, a friend of Nietzsche and Freud and one of the most admired women of the day. Rilke found temporary refuge in many corners of Europe but remained the stateless Romantic his whole life, without ties of family, culture or nation.
Cunningham's writing is beautiful and fluid. I found myself torn, lingering over passages and yet eager to rush on. The same is true for his much-praised first book, 'The Green Age of Asher Witherow,' a compelling historical novel set in a coal mining town in late 19th-century Northern California. For a writer not yet 30, Cunningham has achieved a mature style and authentic voice in 'Lost Son.' He shows how Rilke cultivated the sense of dislocation that fostered his best work, especially during the years he lived in Paris 'namelessly alone,' witnessing the terrifying scenes he would mold into the feverish visions of his alter ego Malte, the Prodigal Son, 'a man who didn't want to be loved.'
But I'm not sure it's right to see 'Lost Son' simply as a fictional biography of Rilke. It is also Cunningham's spiritual autobiography, his own fierce identification with the poet's commitment to art. The book begins and ends with Cunningham in Europe re-imagining Rilke's dark existence in the shadows of World War I, a 'nationless figure in a world gone mad with devotion to country.' The story constantly shifts between straight narration and an eerie second-person voice Cunningham uses to address Rilke directly, such as in this episode, when he watches over the poet's shoulder as he writes a letter:
'All the pent-up energy come of being misunderstood spills forth in phrases blunt and biblical. And you are writing to yourself -- to yourself amidst the impediments and unrelenting pressures encountered when one strives to live by an art born of the heart's deep and dumbfounded regions.'
Later he tells Rilke: 'Maybe I am sailing into the past, your past, and maybe this journey will endow me with new depths of feeling.' In these mesmerizing passages, the 'world gone mad' is as much now as then, the striving to live by art as much Cunningham's as Rilke's." —Vernon Peterson, The Oregonian
"Cunningham has taken risks, attempting to paint Rilke in the poet's own words and style, and he has succeeded in producing an offbeat and absorbing literary work." —Library Journal
"Vivid, melodic, and retaining a lyrical beauty throughout, Cunningham writes with a passionate commitment to Rilke's poetry and life. Meticulously researched and seamlessly infusing fact with fiction, Lost Son 
M. Allen Cunningham is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow, which was#1 Book Sense pick. His short fiction has also appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Glimmer Train, Boulevard, and Epoch. He grew up in California, living for nearly two decades in the Diablo Valley north of San Francisco, and now resides with his wife in Portland, Oregon.
M. Allen Cunningham's Website |
Cunningham's Blog
Lost Son on MySpace |
Unbridled Aloud featuring Cunningham
Cunningham Reading from Lost Son on KQED
Cunningham on RedRoom
Awake to her hands upon you. Morning, and so you have slept a sleep like another life altogether.
Lou sits on the bed at your side, hips at rest in the curve of your prone body. Her soft sleepwarm fingers trace the rim of your ear. She still wears last night’s clothing. The dawn glow is yet soft and nonreflective: glow that gathers, grips things in its silence. The closed shutters behind her hold the light in serried threads.
You fold down the blankets and sit up. You’ve slept in your clothes too. Your whole body bristles with a cool sensation that seems to originate in the small of your back or in your loins: hipbones buttressing some abdominal gleam. And Lou is here. Still here.
“Listen to the quiet,” she says. “Everything’s still asleep.”
She takes you into the garden. A vast silence opalescent in the pre-dawn, everything grayed in a gray mountain-breath. Dark leaf-luster and hush of soil. Within the hour will come the liturgy of color. You stand beside her, you and she barefoot on the dewy earth. It seems you’re waist-deep in a still pool. Lou’s voice riffles the stillness.
“Friedrich taught me about mornings. How every day dreams itself awake.”
You seem to see her words blooming outward into multiple rings. “You mean
Nietzsche?”
“No. Friedrich my husband. We have a glorious garden back home in Schmargendorf. You’ll have to see it someday. Friedrich always works through the night. Always off to bed just as I’m rising. We sit in the garden and watch everything come alive around us.”
“Is he in Schmargendorf now?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you more about him. Not now. Come.”
She clutches her skirts and trots ahead along the garden path. You move after her. Watching the tender rails of her ankles as they tauten at every step, relax, tauten. The mossy earth sends a shock of pleasure through your naked soles as you go.
It’s an expansive garden, bleeding fenceless onto the forested hill behind the cottage. The morning light, yet bedded in the soil, rushes upward through your feet and it seems the day’s dawning begins in your very limbs. The light slowly suffusing the garden is but delayed evincement of that glow within.
Now and then Lou stops and stands still, raises a listening hand, attends to the convening birdcalls. You feel your ears opening like flowers to that sunlight of wavering sound.