Ray of the Star

After spending years devastated by a tragedy whose precise nature is not revealed until the novel's last section, Harry flees to a splendid, labyrinthine, eerie European city to begin anew his "assault on life." He's not there for very long before his grief is distracted by the sight of an "unusually handsome woman with flecks of silver paint on her face," who is sitting alone in a cafe, and by Ireneo, a "tall, elegantly dressed man with extraordinary turquoise eyes and cheekbones that look like they could break razors." Ireneo convinces an initially reluctant Harry to accompany him to a baffling ritual, but it soon transpires that it's all a mistake--the beautiful messenger was supposed to summon the painted woman instead. Yet after Harry is sent on his way, he becomes obsessed with finding either of the other two and solving both the mystery of what he had experienced and the identity of the strange woman who, we soon learn, is recovering from a tragedy of her own. Hunt adapts many influences and weaves them into something utterly unique. As critic James Gibbons points out in the BookForum review that led me to purchase this novel, the chapter-long sentences strikingly echo Jose Saramago's prose; likewise, the never-identified city (Barcelona?) recalls Saramago's Lisbon. The widower Harry is oddly reminiscent of the widower David Zimmer, whose escape into silent movies and subsequent dream-like journey similarly rescues him from overwhelming grief in Paul Auster's "Book of Illusions." There are David Lynch-inspired ceremonies conducted by an elderly woman who may or may not be a psychic, Thomas Pynchon-like running shoes that talk to their owner, and a Peter Max-influenced yellow submarine--plus a store selling costumes for city inhabitants who want to try their luck working as "living statues," an elderly neighbor who waits for visits from her dead husband, and a trio of old yet ageless men whose coarse sarcasm and thug-like trash-talk barely disguise their true nature as representatives of death. The novel alternates between humor and dread to build a suspense that carries the story to a climatic confrontation that is both absurd and numinous yet ends up making a weird and disturbing kind of sense. And, in spite of the sentences that range over several pages and the seemingly nonsensical twists in the plot, "Ray of the Star" is a surprisingly easy and lyrical read (I've read it twice now and loved it even more the second time). Readers looking for novels that push the envelope of the traditional narrative are sure to enjoy this slim book, at once an enchanting love story and a taut work of fantasy.