Sun House

(em português com links → sol2070.in/2024/08/livro-sun-house-david-james-duncan/ )

A few books are more than literature, they are a major event in life. ‘Sun House’ (2023), by David James Duncan, is one of the three or four in which I've felt this.

It's a nearly 800-page epic about how a handful of people in the US, facing the various degenerations of the world in recent decades, end up converging in a natural area in the state of Montana.

I laughed a lot at the ingeniously miraculous scenes. I cried not only at major or minor calamities, but also at the transcendent melting in the reconnection with the essence of nature that permeates the story - although this sounds new age, it's far from it.

Yes, it's an intensely spiritual book, but it clashes head-on with institutions, dogmas and preaching, based more on direct experience of the lost essential dimension. For example, one of the characters - a wanderer who says ‘the fuck!’ every two sentences and spends the day interacting with random people on the street - ends up inspiring the emergence of ‘rubbish bin Catholicism’, which revives the experience of people executed or excommunicated as heretics by the Church.

All the familiar spiritual references in the book really resonated with me - although I don't write much about it here, the secular mystical experience is an essential part of my life - especially how it connects with nature and the current planetary polycrisis.

But the spirituality of "Sun House" -- which actually takes up about 30 per cent of the pages -- doesn't eclipse the rest, it runs through it. There is no shortage of romance (even love at first sight), family trauma, friendship, music and natural adventure.

In the afterword, David says that it took him 16 years to write the book:

‘Seventeen years ago, in a world in which the problems facing humanity and every living thing had overwhelmed our politics and many a politician’s sanity, I came to feel the world situation is so darkly mythic; epic; overwhelming, that only a collectively mythic and epic response stood a chance of righting the countless wrongs. But though I’d seen countless op-eds calling for a change of consciousness if humanity is to survive, I’d seen zero op-ed descriptions of what this consciousness looks, feels, tastes, sounds, and lives like as it addresses inescapable biological and spiritually realities with the love, truthfulness, and justice they demand.’

Despite the immensity of the project, this is what he has managed to do with Sun House, his third novel, after two cult countercultural bestsellers - ‘The River Why’ (1983) and ‘The Brothers K’ (1992), which I haven't read yet.

The profuse inventiveness reminded me of writers like Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon's ‘Gravity's Rainbow’, with the advantage of being an author whose political, spiritual and cultural inclinations seem perfectly aligned with my own.

It's one of those books where you come away loving the characters wholeheartedly, as if they were part of your life. Almost half of the book delves into the stories of each character and, little by little, they all become intertwined.

Towards the end, it's revealed what the ‘Sun House’ of the title is, in one of the most vividly sweeping natural pantheistic mythologies I've ever seen. The ending itself is epic enough to take to the grave.

If you read in English and are interested in nature, utopia, the search for meaning and spirituality without hauntings and institutions, all tied together in a very well-told story, ‘Sun House’ is the book.

Link to how they're praising the book → www.davidjamesduncan.com/sun-house ).