Anton’s Comments (group member since Dec 30, 2015)

Anton’s comments from the Existentialism group.

Expectedly, I didn't see a thread for book promotions, so I'm posting this in "general".

“The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly” is a philosophical, psychological, essayistic novel that treats the topic of unrequited love. Largely experimental. A difficult, demanding reading.

The leitmotif of the novel is ‘insane love.’ However, the book doesn't confine itself to that topic alone but also seeks to explore various other topics that arguably correspond with it, such as the mechanisms of consciousness and faith, the concept of free will and the choice between Good and Evil. It poses a lot of existential questions — respectively, proposes a lot of answers — along the line: Is it possible that even the truest and most intense love can be rejected? – What do ‘true’ and ‘intense’ mean when speaking of ‘insane love’? – What are the love-related aspects of controversy between the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, the perfect and the imperfect, the transient and the eternal? – What can this controversy cause to the tormented soul of the madly in love? – Where does the adorable end and where does the abhorable begin on the way to the extreme; is there a prelude; how ‘spacious’ is the space in between? – Is expression possible at all if one’s experience goes beyond the conveyable by conventional means?

The book is available for free download on Amazon on 24th (today), 25th, and 26th September.

Regards,
Anton

Hi,

a kind reminder that today is the first of the three days of free promotion of my book.

The Prince closed his eyes and tried to imagine peacefully grazing cattle, a dog’s skull lying among the blades of the grass pulled by the trembling strings of the wind, under the warming gaze of the sun. Or, maybe he imagined it otherwise, maybe the dog was still alive, his skull dressed in flesh, maybe the cattle weren’t grazing, or they were, but they weren’t peaceful. Could be cattle and people peaceful at all, could be a dog completely innocent of life — even if it’s mere skull and bones — there, in the green grass, between the palms of the wind, under the eyes of the sun!...
The Prince succumbed to the cold embrace of the marble and imagined the light steps of the moon on its surface — a step back, a step forth, a solemnly slow swing — dancing the dance of a bride who prepares to marry a groom more handsome than beauty, more alive than life, who prepares for happiness beyond happiness, lasting more than time can last, in a house more white and more pure than white and pure can be...
The Prince was standing midst the wilderness — his bare feet pressing against the cracked soil — swaggering and laughing. His teeth were shimmering, white as the teeth of a dead dog at a sunny noon, white as the white cross of a church in the altar of a cloudless summer sky, white as the feast clothes of young lads who — lined up in a row, hand in hand — are dancing a bachelor’s dance for the very last time. He was sleeping and, in his dream, She was loving him.
“Maybe, someday,” said the Prince who wasn’t a prince anymore, while his tomb — placed in the womb of a huge ship without a flag — was sailing away from the shores of the Kingdom, “She’ll come into my marble home, between Life and Death, between Heaven and Hell, between Meaning and Vanity...” However, attempts at self-consoling like these only make one sadder. The Prince leaned his back against the white wall — which, although white, was black because of the darkness — and without to expect anything, kept waiting. “Good that there’s no candle here, because in the light of its flame, the furrows on the walls would dance a dance that would make me wish to fall asleep and never wake up again,” the Prince thought to himself. He believed that he had cut Her image in the marble of those walls more truly than the Sun was able to see it — sharp and subtle as a shadow, cold and cruel as a kiss, pale and fading as a ghost...

("The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly")

A further excerpt:

"Anatoly believed that self-comparison to others had become of little-to-no importance to him. He believed that he had killed the drive in himself to compete with others, he believed that he had dived into his own world to never [want to] go back / up / out to the world of others. A world not as thrillingly chaotic — or chaotically thrilling — as the world that he used to live in back then, but still a world which belonged to him, a world in which he felt at home. However, somehow he also knew that his old world would live on, too, in some corner of his I; he knew that a world that has been truly sacred to someone would live on in him even after he happens / decides not to live on in it — a world that furiously conquers the senses, that can set imagination ablaze with intenseness; a world that can cost the sanity of anyone who dares stay in it for more than a throb of his heart — in a garden overly saturated with greenness, subtly soaked in ethereal fog and reigned by ghostly solitude, with stones erecting askew out of its soil, distorting the lines of light and logic alike, zealously guarded and overseen by their creator: a huge giant cut out of stone — motionlessly seated in a lifeless posture, his elbows on his knees, his back crooked under the burden of his own imageries and reflective set-ups, sunk into helplessness after thousands of failures at taking a grasp of — and, subsequently, running a thread of sense through — a world created by himself, for himself, at fathoming the secret of every single blade of grass, of every single tone of sound, of the motion of any shape and the shape of any motion, of the essence and sense of every single object, sensible or reflective, of a world of which he holds only a half; a giant who knows — and this is the actual source of his despair — that he also needs the other half of his own universe in order to have the key to his own creation."

("The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly")

Kind regards,
Anton

Hi again,

as an update to the initial post above: I have scheduled a three days’ free book promotion for my book ("The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly"), from 14 to 16 January 2016. Feel free to have a free copy of it from the Amazon website during the said period. Since I realise it's not an easy decision to pay for something you have no impressions from / recommendations for in advance (especially in the area of self-publishing), I decided that this may be a good way for me to [try to] get people read it and give an opinion / recommend it to others. An excerpt follows:

"If / when the little Anatoly had a new toy car, he would either reduce it to tiny pieces or, alternatively, put it in a very safe place, where he would be able to adore it for as long as he wishes — from distance, without the risk to break it or even scratch it. Instead of playing with it, he would play with some of his old toy cars, with the notional image of the new toy car dressed over it. This way, he could live in the state of love for his new toy car, while it would stay safe and untouched both in and outside his heart. Anatoly had the inclination — unrealised for the most part of his life — to apply the toy car ‘hack’ to the reality of love, too. “Such love cannot be true,” most people would have said in his face. The grown-up Anatoly was well aware of that. But he was also not less aware of something else. He knew that, when a person loves another person, the loved person is always an unreal, imaginary, made-up image, no matter how close it seems to be to the real source. This would be the case even with spouses who’ve been sharing one and the same table and bed for years. Anatoly was convinced that the purest romantic love — from emotional, but also idealistic point of view — can only exist between a man and the image of a woman, or between a woman and the image of a man. “Even if we expand the ‘tolerance of truth’ and allow ourselves to take a greater-than-the-usual distance from the ‘real’ image, the principle in itself remains unchanged,” Anatoly believed. “But then, how would we be able to tell the difference between both cases,” you’ll probably ask. In short: a greater delicacy of emotion at the expense of emotion intensity. Imagine it as an invisible string connecting the subject and the object of affection — the longer the string, the more subtle the longing; the shorter the string, the more sensible the bonding. It’s by far more intense to hold the ‘real’ toy car in your real hand, but beholding it from distance generates a more delicate longing for the idea of holding it. But let’s go back to Anatoly. He used to seal the adored, idealised and perfect image of the beloved object in the transparent — yet only for his inner sight — chest of his heart, behind the delicate yet solid wall which was separating him from others. A wall he had built driven by his natural inability to share the unnatural, by his limitless helplessness in expressing the limitless. A hindrance that felt so insurmountable that it was bringing his eagerness to express himself to its limits, yet just to bring him the feeling that a satisfactory expression is an unbearably unachievable project. “What’s the point in possessing the greatest treasure in this world — and probably in any other — if it remains locked in the chest of your heart, if no one ever comes to know of it, if it dies buried in your flesh, if it renders to dust as your flesh does,” Anatoly used to repeat to himself in grief, years before the time came for him to exclaim: “Thank God we have the ability to forget! How ironic is that one learns his whole life long, and one of the most valuable skills he can possibly master is the skill of forgetting, yes, the skill of letting go — of letting go of feelings; of letting oneself go after goals out of courtesy alone; of letting one’s soul revive by killing it; of letting oneself live on with the thought of having hurt someone else; of letting oneself behold the world like an old man with the eyes of a naive boy; of letting oneself master the calmness of a lamb, dressed in the formidable assertiveness of a predator, with a fur soaked in the blood of another lamb!...”

("The Unsettling Love Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly")

I would be really happy to have your feedback,

Greets,
Anton

Hi everybody,

I would like to inform you that I recently self-published “The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly”, a philosophical existential novel that focuses on the topic of romantic love (but covers also a lot of other topics, such as the mechanisms of faith and consciousness, the expediency of truth, the struggle against the acceptance of meaninglessness, etc.).

In the external storyline, Anatoly meets the girl he's in love with (Katherine), and later on the same day he becomes aggressive towards her and her company (including her boyfriend, Aemilius) out of a sudden, for no good / apparent reason. The internal storyline tells why.

Focused on the inner world of the protagonist, the book seeks to show how dramatically wide the gap can be between the intention and the deed, between the apparent and the unexpressed. It seeks to create an engaging image of a psycho-/sociopath who has become such because of his 'excessive' belief in idealistic values, and especially in the concept of perfect romantic love. It seeks to provide an insight into what can be actually happening in the mind of such a person in the course of one of his 'strange acting' episodes, and what his inner reasons can be to behave in unreasonable ways. It advocates the thesis that there are no bad people, only hurt ones. It also wants to show that seeking to be idealistic and good more than 'you're meant to be by your human nature' can ultimately lead you to extremes that are difficult to be given a positive interpretation, especially by those who have become the victims of your originally good intentions, or who have witnessed your intricate ways in pursuing them.

The Bulgarian-language version of the novel qualified me for the finals of the literary contest “Rakopisat” (“The Manuscript”), organised by the Bulgarian National Television (BNT 1) and based on the format of Italian TV channel Rai 3's “The Masterpiece.”

I invite you to take a look at its preview here, on Goodreads (there is also the “Look Inside” option on the Amazon website of course) and decide if you are interested in reading it. If you do, I would be very happy to have your feedback.

Thanks and a happy new year to all!

Anton