‘The Starless Sea’ is about the journey, not the destination

Erin Morgenstern’s “The Starless Sea” is an impossibly ambitious, experiential and maddening book, one built like a role-playing video game (the kind where you wander around lost while trying to figure out what to do).

The role you play is that of Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune teller who discovers a memory from his childhood inside the pages of an unauthored book donated to his university.

In his quest to discover where this mysterious book, titled “Sweet Sorrows,” came from, he meets a woman dressed like Max from “Where the Wild Things Are,” and goes through a painted disappearing door which leads him down and down the rabbit hole into a dreamy Storyland where time doesn’t move.

Morgenstern’s entire novel is an elaborate exercise in mise en abyme, a French phrase which translates to “setting in the abyss.” “The Starless Sea” is an abyss of stories within stories and books within books (divided into six parts and an afterword), woven together by Morgenstern’s words and Rawlins’ quest to find them.

Rawlins’ map: This sestina of six mysteriously repeating symbols — bees, keys, swords, crowns, hearts and feathers.

Meanwhile, Morgenstern winks to her favorite book and stories, by having her characters reference Donna Tartt’s “Goldfinch” and “The Secret History,” C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia,” Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” and others.

The stories from the books within this book are more compelling than Rawlins’ own. These stories explain why the wind howls and where the moon goes. They tell of a sword that slay kings and lovers from different times. It’s easy to get lost inside these stories, throw away your compass and drift on “The Starless Sea” — much easier to drift that mentally fight the book’s logic — that time does not exist. Soon, as you travel deeper and deeper into the heart of this book, full on a diet of stories, you won’t care if the walls cave in or if you have a destination or ever get there.

Instead, you’re sedated under Morgenstern’s cocktail of warm and intoxicating mead and bitters, stirred by stories within stories within stories.

“The Starless Sea”
By Erin Morgenstern.
498 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
2019.

A literary star is born in ‘A Ladder To The Sky’

John Boyne’s “A Ladder To The Sky” isn’t a slow book or a long book (it’s quite the opposite, really, especially compared to “The Heart’s Invisible Furies”), but it’s one that took me about half a year to read.

Why?

Because it’s one of those books where you know bad things are predictably going to happen.

“A Ladder To The Sky”
By John Boyne.
362 pp. Hogarth. $27.
2018.

Told in three parts, multiple points of views and in both first and third person, “A Ladder To The Sky,” as its title might suggest, is a meta, cleverly written character study of a ruthless man and his disturbing quest for fame and immortality.

Spoiler alert: Maurice Swift does get what he wants.

But it comes at a cost.

Swift — although described as a young, beautiful, charming and charismatic — isn’t a likable protagonist.

Perhaps he could have been if we heard from Swift’s point of view first. Instead, we’re first introduced to Erich Ackermann, a closeted, flawed and accomplished 65-year-old novelist who becomes Swift’s first mentor. Ackermann’s quite taken with Swift (his appearance more than his writing) and invites Swift to accompany him on his travels. Desperate to hold Swift’s attention, Ackermann tells Swift his own story, a shameful secret: That upon a time when Ackermann was a Hitler youth, he fell in love with another German boy who liked a Jewish girl.

This story, which takes place during Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, doesn’t have a happy ending.

And Ackermann would have taken that story to his grave.

But Ackermann’s stolen story becomes the basis for Swift’s bestselling novel, “Two Germans,” the vehicle that launches Swift to international literary fame and crucifies Ackermann’s own literary successes.

Thus, Boyne satires the plot to Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell’s melodramatic screenplay, “A Star Is Born,” and Swift achieves immortality with rungs of bestselling books built on the backs of other people.

But even as Swift climbs higher and higher by taking credit for others’ work, the ladder Boyne builds is more like a scale, weighing and measuring the lives and sins of novelist Maurice Swift against Erich Ackermann’s.

Which sins have more weight?

It’s not for us to judge — although Boyne treats Ackermann’s story with more sympathy.