WHITE APPLES - JONATHAN CARROL

A white apple is a very potent type of Ecstasy.

Jonathan Carroll is the author of: White Apples, Bathing the Lion, Crows Dinner, Bones of the Moon, The Ghost in Love, Glass Soup, The Wooden Sea, The Marriage of Sticks, Kissing The Beehive, From the Teeth of Angels, After Silence, Outside the Dog Museum, A Child Across the Sky, Sleeping in Flame, and more.

Jonathan Samuel Carroll is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labeled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria since the 1970s.

Jonathan Carroll is a living legend of American origin. His works are very popular in America and the rest of the world as well. We can expect more great work from him.

White Apples tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, who is dead and brought back to life again. Ettrich slowly learns that he is brought back by his wife Isabelle and is back to save his unborn son. Ettrich's unborn son will eventually save the universe if Ettrich can protect him from evil forces. This is a work of metaphysics and surrealism.

Vincent Ettrich, a genial philanderer, discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like. Gradually, he realizes he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle because she is pregnant with their child—a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe.

But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side—if only Vincent can remember it. A father's love and struggle may depend on the future of everything.

By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.

Carroll at a reading in Stacey's Bookstore,
San Francisco, in 2008

Carroll was born in New York City to Sidney Carroll, a film writer whose credits included The Hustler, and June Carroll (née Sillman), an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films. He is the half-brother of composer Steve Reich and nephew of Broadway producer Leonard Sillman. His parents were Jewish, but Carroll was raised in the Christian Science religion. A self-described "troubled teenager," he finished primary education at the Loomis School in Connecticut and graduated with honors from Rutgers University in 1971, marrying artist Beverly Schreiner in the same year. He relocated to Vienna, Austria a few years later and began teaching literature at the American International School, and has made his home in Austria ever since.

His first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), is indicative of his general style and subject matter. Told through realistic first-person narration, the Novel concerns a young schoolteacher, Thomas Abbey, researching the life of a favorite children's book author of his youth, which involves meeting the author's daughter in her and her late father's seemingly idyllic hometown of Galen, Missouri. Everything seems fine until a dog in Galen begins talking to Abbey. The line gradually blurs between the fantasy world created by Abbey's research subject and the life of the people in Galen, while the reader begins to wonder just how much trust can be placed in this narrator. Subsequent novels would expand on these themes but often contain unreliable narrators in a world where magic is viewed as natural. (One commentator claimed in The Times that "if he were a Latin American writer with a three-part name, his books would be described as magical-realist".)

There are several brainy quotes by Jonathan Carrol. One of his famous quotes is about dogs.

“Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etc. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of funny but little more. However, when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day-- we're just so used to them that we pay no attention.”
― Jonathan Carroll

I would like to present here below some of his famous titles.

He won many awards during his career as a writer so far :

Carroll's short story, "Friend's Best Man", won the World Fantasy Award. His novel, Outside the Dog Museum, won the British Fantasy Award and his collection of short stories won the Bram Stoker Award. The short story "Uh-Oh City" won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. His short story "Home on the Rain" was chosen as one of the best stories of the year by the Pushcart Prize committee. Carroll has been a runner-up for other World Fantasy Awards, the Hugo, and British Fantasy Awards.

Bibliography

Novels

· The Land of Laughs (1980)
· Voice of Our Shadow (1983)
· The Answered Prayers Sextet

Bones of the Moon (1987) (slightly revised US edition, 1988)
Sleeping in Flame (1988) – World Fantasy Award nominee, 1989
A Child Across the Sky (1989, Washington Post Book of the Year) – BSFA nominee, 1989; WFA and Clarke nominee, 1990[7]
Outside the Dog Museum (1991) – British Fantasy Award winner, WFA nominee, 1992
After Silence (1992)
From the Teeth of Angels (1993), – New York Times Book Review Notable Book; WFA nominee, 1995

· The Crane's View Trilogy
·

Kissing the Beehive (1997) – British Fantasy Award nominee, 1999
The Marriage of Sticks (2000) – British Fantasy Award nominee, 2000
The Wooden Sea (2001, New York Times Book Review Notable Book) – Locus and World Fantasy Awards nominee, 2002
White Apples (2002) – Locus and World Fantasy Awards nominee, 2003
Glass Soup (2005)
Oko Dnia (Eye of the Day) (2006, Polish language edition)
The Ghost in Love (2008)
Bathing the Lion (2014)

Novellas and short novels

Black Cocktail (1990)
The Heidelberg Cylinder (2000) [1000 copy limited edition, signed by Jonathan Carroll and cover artist Dave McKean. A few remaining copies left over from the print run were sold without signatures.]
Teaching the Dog to Read (2015)

Short story collections

Die Panische Hand (1989) (German language edition)
The Panic Hand (1995) [expansion of the 1989 German language edition; the 1996 US edition adds the novella Black Cocktail]
The Woman Who Married A Cloud: Collected Stories (2012)

We learn from him that high-quality journalism is essential intellectual nourishment.

Jonathan Carroll keeps getting better. Considering where he started (The Land of Laughs, 1975), that's pretty amazing. An American resident in Vienna for more than 25 years, Carroll has a unique and sophisticated vision. In the US he is now a literary bestseller. Carroll's modern morality tales take for granted a metaphysical dimension to our lives and have most in common with the work of Alan Wall or Peter Ackroyd. Whether or not they contain supernatural themes, his books always deal with the petty, corrosive crimes we commit against one another.

Like many Carroll novels, White Apples is a love story. Here his lovers are the resurrected Vincent Ettrich, recently dead of cancer, and Isabelle Neukor, the woman for whom he left his wife and children. An obsessively skilled seducer, Vincent finally renounced all others for Isabelle, only for her to get cold feet about living with him. Now he wants to know how and why he was resurrected, to continue living and functioning in his familiar world. She seems to have more of the answers than he does.

Isabelle, we learn, played Orpheus, bringing Vincent back from Purgatory, thus attracting the fury of Chaos, determined to thwart an upcoming rebirth in the nature of the universe. That rebirth will destroy Chaos's newly acquired consciousness. The fate of existence now hangs on the life of their unborn child, Anjo, who must be taught all his father has learned of death, much of which Vincent can't seem to recall.

Attacking memory and identity, using fear, uncertainty, and illusion as its initial weapons, Chaos adopts various human and animal disguises. Attempting to preserve life and mutability, the forces of law are represented by guardian angel Coco Hallis, a woman Vincent meets and apparently seduces in a lingerie shop. She can help him but she's not omnipotent, especially against the increasing power of Chaos.

A beautifully realized notion of God as a mosaic consisting of and created by each of our lives, themselves also comprising a mosaic of memory, is reflected in the method Carroll uses in this book, which is itself something of a mosaic, moving back and forth in time and space to tell the story and produce its moving epiphany. Always a very subtle writer, Carroll quietly presents resolutions and revelations you could miss if you blink. I was impressed by the sureness of this particular structure; he uses no familiar genre tricks to maintain suspense, yet still communicates nail-biting concern for the well-being of his central characters and a terrible fear for the fate of the universe.

This originality of structure confirms my opinion that Carroll is in no real sense a genre writer at all. There's a moving scene that in a cruder book would have functioned as a finale, but here appears about two-thirds of the way through. Chaos, disguised as innocent visitors, begins to attack the zoo animals who are the protagonists' protectors. The courageous self-sacrifice of these animals as they are horribly destroyed fighting a subtle and disgusting kind of evil serves to demonstrate the ferocious power of Chaos, which, endowed with sentience, will use any means to survive, even though the end result of its efforts is the corruption and death of creation itself.

Moving between the present and versions of their past, talking to their dead, Vincent and Isa-belle face the roots of their own moral cowardice and spiritual weaknesses, and by engaging with them they become strong enough to face Chaos's threat and learn how to defend themselves against it. But learning self-defense is only the first step in a struggle that, while never reliant on conventional theology, carries echoes of Charles Williams (The Place of the Lion, 1931) at his very best.

A wise woman warns: "Never let your past salt your meat for you," helping Vincent and Isabelle gather strength as Chaos grows almost overwhelmingly powerful, adopting increasingly subtle manifestations in its efforts to destroy the child still in the womb.

Impressively, Carroll maintains his questions and tensions to the very last paragraph. Thanks to his clever balance of reality and metaphysics, we can't be entirely certain Chaos will be defeated, but we have at least come to believe it a thoroughly possible resolution.

In one of my earlier blog posts, I recommended you to read the book "Shantaram" written by Australian criminal turned author Gregory David Roberts published first in the year 2003.

It is interesting to note the praise of Jonathan Carroll about "Shantaram" as follows -

"Shantaram " is, quite simply, the Arabian Nights of the new century. Anyone who loves to read has been looking for this book all their life. Anyone who walks away from "Shantaram" untouched is either heartless or dead or both. I haven't had such a wonderful time in years".

I hope I will get another opportunity to write more about Jonathan Carroll in JOHNNY'S BLOG in the years to come and I wish him all the best to write more interesting classics.

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