THE SPIRAL OF WORDS
An intrepid writer undertakes a long walk towards the ocean where he hopes to source the essential and immortal words he yearns for. Along the way, he traverses the streets of Nice, Lisbon, Cádiz and Marrakech where he confronts the shapes and shadows that harbor his inner fears and desires. His reality then collides with the elliptical passage of the mythical man in the striped tunic. The two minds create a spiral of words spawning a narrative that emboldens the writer and unearths the past of the striped tunic. With this novel, the STRIPED TUNIC TRILOGY comes full circle. The two previous novels are AIR and THE ROAR OF THE RIVER. The sense of words and language as primal utterance in this trilogy shows the American mindset refracted into many other peoples in this now world.
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
“Even writing outside of tradition, Armenteros realizes he will not be the first or last to do so. We must move from the river to the ocean. Ezra Pound stated that only emotion endures, and emotions are what we all share. Armenteros echoes that sentiment, saying ‘the story was not the story of a man or a woman, of a country or a continent, but the story of the emotions of all who live and have lived on the face of the earth.’” —American Book Review
“The Spiral of Words, by Jorge Armenteros, is not just highly compelling as narrative and convincing as exploration of literary form, it is also beautifully written, with sentence after sharp sentence sculpting a whole brimming with surprising meaning and meaningful insight. As I have been with past work by Armenteros, I was taken by this novel’s calm, elegant cadences, but also by its willingness to challenge, unsettle and provoke. As Armenteros writes in one of The Spiral of Words’ many fine passages, ‘That is the danger; a book may be bolder than yourself and reveal what you refuse to accept.’ I strongly encourage you to experience this bold, revelatory work for yourself.” —Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and In the House in the Dark of the Woods
“Armenteros’ richly imagistic The Spiral of Words is a writer’s odyssey, is a book with the blood of Borges in its wanderers’ rivers, is a book with worlds of myth and magical realism hovering. It seeks beginnings, invokes the inner-driven walker, ravenous for words, invokes the collective shadow, the collective lost, the collective seeker, the oceans, the wind...all chasing miracles of chance. And a reeking stalker in a striped tunic, a soul of longing and confession ... is existentially near. The unknown pulls the reader like a determined undertow. Spiral of Word sis a truly brave literary accomplishment.” —Margo Berdeshevsky, author of Beautiful Soon Enough and Before the Drought
“In the experimental traditions of Cortázar and Borges, Armenteros leads the reader through a multitude of paths that wind both around and into each other, creating for the reader the 'spiral of words' of the title. At the center of the spiral lies the mysterious and omniscient striped tunic, a character whose strange and ethereal presence permeates the very fabric of the novel's existential complexities. Equal parts metafictional mystery and meditation on the artistic process, The Spiral of Words is that rare dream that is as disturbing as it is hypnotic. —Laurie Foos, author of Ex Utero and The Blue Girl