Recent reads

God Head, by Leonard Cline. This 1925 book and its author seem to be completely forgotten. I've searched every bookselling venue I know of, and can't find a single copy available for sale. I hope that someone reprints it one of these days, since it's an extraordinary book.

We first meet our protagonist and narrator, one Paulus Kempf, as he flees in terror from a vigilantes' raid on a union-organizing meeting in Ironwood, Michigan. Cline's prose is very unusual, almost like a ritual incantation or the driving rythym of medieval alliterative poetry:

Phantasmal night. Terrors and shapes pursued me, loomed suddenly before me, menaced me with upraised fists; stealthy footfalls I imagined cracklign in the brush on all sides of me. And across the black sky moved slow columns of ghastly bluish light, monstrous fingers they were that pointed along the hills and the roads and poked into every coign [sic] and hiding-place. They were searchlights set up at the various mines and on top the shafts, sweeping the highways in search of suspicious travelers ... sweeping the hills in search of me. Later I learned that barriers were strung across every road on all the Gogebic, and men armed with shotguns lay in wait behind them; that word had circulated I was seeking to escape and must be captured. What hue and fever wracked the range that night I did not know, but nevertheless surmised; and I pressed on ecstatic with fear beneath the screening trees. The darkness and the loneliness of the woods terrified me too, but not so much as did the thought of noose and gallows-fire and pouring of bullets behind me.

His nightmarish flight ends in peaceful refuge with a small Finnish family at their isolated farmstead on the shore of Lake Superior, deep among the trackless forests and rocky hills of the western upper peninsula. As he recuperates, Paulus slowly gets to know his rescuers. Karl, the towering man-mountain who carried him out of the woods, proves to be a steadfast, if somewhat stolid, sympathizer with his own political views. But Paulus himself is more sympathetically drawn to Karl's wife, Aino, an intelligent and spirited young woman of "lusty peasant beauty".

As he slowly recovers, she tells him the stories of the Kalevala, a cycle of mythic tales central to Finnish culture. At first he finds himself identifying with Kullervo, the tragic hero whose efforts, no matter how heroic or well-intentioned, always end in disaster. But then, as his attraction to Aino grows, she relates the tales of Lemminkainen, the amoral trickster who always wins, always escapes, always triumphs, though at terrible cost to everyone around him. And Paulus begins to adopt, more and more, the persona of just such a trickster.

I won't give away the ending of the book. Suffice to say that it's powerful, it's extraordinarily well written, and it's a superbly effective portrayal of the subtle power that myth can exercise over the human mind. One could debate whether Paulus is influenced by the tales of the Kalevala, by his own intellectual tendencies, or even that he is in some sense possessed by a supernatural agency. But the power of the book is beyond debate, and it does not deserve the near-oblivion to which our publishing industry and perpetual-copyright regime have consigned it.