THE ROAR OF THE RIVER
Set in a perched village of the French Alps, between a roaring river and the moonlight, a man dressed in a striped tunic seeks refuge from his dying past. Instead, he encounters an iconoclastic set of characters that offer him love, instigate fear, explore the meaning of language, and elicit revenge. Following the musical structure of the 17th-century fugue, the narrative voices succeed each other until coming together in a polyphonic search for light among the darkness of their origins.
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
“Armenteros compels us to hear our own roar of the river and follow the course. He is one of our most innovative, introspective and brilliant writers.” American Book Review
"Jorge Armenteros's The Roar of the River isn't a tale of suspense so much as it is a book whose pages crackle with myriad frictions. These characters may resemble the phantasmata—simultaneously posing and maneuvered—familiarly associated with the chanson de geste's medieval dreamlands, yet they are anything but benighted victims of fate. Rather, like the personifications that relieve the flatness of the fable's total ethics, these figures struggle against all that is archetypal about them. Is it possible to survive a world bent on othering the most humane aspects of our humanity? Quest or riddle, Armenteros understands that, nowadays, indomitables like these fall (if they fall at all) to those willing to scratch out and scratch away. " — Joe Milazzo, author of Crepuscule W/ Nellie and The Habiliments
"The Roar of the River is a lucid dream, a winding and watery tale of a vengeful river. Teeming with life and a roar with many strange voices, this novel is absolutely relentless. Armenteros is a master who has given his readers something wholly new." —William Walsh, author of Forty-four American Boys, Pathologies, and Unknown Arts
“Beautifully written and crafted, The Roar of the River is a mythic incantation of the relationship between nature and culture. Armenteros evokes the dreamscapes and desires of Marquez, Joyce, and Ballard while asserting his own distinctive voice.” — D. Harlan Wilson, author of Battles without Honor or Humanity and Primordial: An Abstraction