Freeing Eurydice: A Neo-Gnostic Fairy Tale

by Bertrand Mathieu

With Freeing Eurydice, Bertrand MathieU delivers his most exciting and readable work to date. This strange metaphysical adventure novel starts out in a few mundane purlieus of present-day Massachusetts and Connecticut, but it soon moves, outside time, to Athens and a number of mystery-laden Greek islands. The narrator, who has been on the brink of a total breakdown, meets and falls in love with the brilliant but erratic Greta Elspeth Brand, who is both an astrophysicist at MIT and a practicing witch in a Vermont coven. Greta impulsively decides not only to try to save her "psychic twin" but to go with him to Greece on the first leg of a bizarre personal itinerary that's designed to change life on earth for everybody! Through a weird concatenation of events, the lovers are painfully torn asunder by the appearance of the alluring vagabond-Casanova, Lucio, and the luminously beautiful Chryssa (a femme fatale from Crete who is the antithesis of Greta) as well as a number of other odd mystics, poets, and plain time-servers who will exercise the power of decisively transforming the narrator's sense of what time really means. A deeply-probing, intricately-plotted novel, filled with artful epiphanies and arresting encounters with the unforeseeable, Freeing Eurydice draws the reader into its many-leveled labyrinth of uncanny poetic discoveries and leads to a final heart-wrenching climax that will long continue to haunt (perhaps even to transfigure) its readers' lives.

472 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2006