"When I began Parsifal, as odd as it was, it felt grounded because in one way or another it was my story."

So relates American author Jim Krusoe when discussing this off the wall, wacky short novel, his fifth following Iceland, Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You.

Turning the pages of Parsifal, I had the distinct sense I was reading a tale with a strong autobiographical spin. By way of example, Parsifal features the ongoing war between sky and earth: large, heavy objects - car engine blocks, water pumps, microwave ovens, propane cylinders - repeatedly falling from the sky while the earth retaliates with erupting volcanoes, sandstorms and forest fires. Jim Krusoe told an interviewer his childhood was an unhappy one, growing up in a home where his parents argued and battled continually. How far removed is sky and earth combat in Parsifal from a young boy witnessing his mom and dad shouting, hurling insults and throwing objects at one another?

A word on the book's format: unlike his previous four novels, in Pasifal there's white space between paragraphs, sometimes very short paragraphs, even as short as a sentence or two. And the white space is there for a definite reason - per author Jim's own words:

"In ordinary prose every paragraph touches every other paragraph, leaving no room for the unknown. All that white space is important to me because, as in a poem, it signals that things are absent. The space represents everything mysterious for me in the story, and when I began it, this was practically everything. . . . The spaces are very, very intentional, and in fact they made it possible to write the book."

The story itself in its peculiar, kooky way is a hero's journey, most befitting since main character Parsifal shares his name with an Arthurian knight in quest of the Holy Grail. Also in keeping with that medieval tale, Parsifal is written in close third person, a departure for Jim Krusoe as all his previous novels are narrated in the first person.

For those new to the author, let me stress we're talking top-notch storytelling here, clear, accessible language propelling an entertaining yarn - quite the accomplishment since Jim Krusoe plays ping pong with time; or, in slightly more formal terms, his novel frequently moves, shuffles and shakes in nonlinear progression.

Picaresque, anyone? As medieval knight Parsifal (or Parzival) encounters various challenges as he embarks on his epic quest in search of the Holy Grail, so our tale’s hero sets out to return to the forest of his boyhood to find a metal soup cup his dad made for him, a cup emblazoned with the word “Fenjewla.” If you sense a bit of Monty Python tongue-in-cheek working here, you're probably right, however, there's good reason the novel carries an epigraph from Paul Verlaine, "What is the sadness that creeps into my heart?"

Sadness, indeed. On the very first page, a mini paragraph reads, "Parsifal is of average height, and more or less normal looking, except for the scar." Further on in the tale, many are the instances of son Parsifal subjected to abuse, both physical and emotional - case in point, Parsifal's home consisted of a thatched hovel where he couldn't open the front door; rather, he had to crawl through an underground tunnel lined with thorns and sharp roots sticking out every which way.

And Parsifal was raised mostly by his mother, Pearl, while his father, Conrad, spent his time away in the city as a stockbroker. Parsifal recalls his mom's repeated admonition, "Stick out your tongue and the bear will bite it off." Parsifal takes Pearl's words to heart since, after all, a bear actually broke into their hovel and killed his pet squirrel.

I found one Parsifel childhood episode positively heart-wrenching: two young boys, brothers, play a game with a small dog in the ocean: the boys drag the dog with a rope around its neck in the waves crashing in at the shore until the dog is drowned. Some game! Parsifal learns quickly the sadistic ways of the world.

Throughout the tale, Parsifal returns to his dreams of death. Parsifal tells a librarian (most of the women in Parsifal's adult life are librarians) that the only dreams he has are those where he dies. This preoccupation with dreams and death echoes the author's own ongoing theme of expanding notions of conventional reality by exploring the world of dreams and realms touching on death.

As an adult living in the city, Parsifal takes up an unusual occupation: he becomes an expert in the repair of fountain pens. Thus he meets beautiful Misty, a hippie-type lady in need of a fountain pen repairman for her Waterman fountain pen. Parsifal also has a string of interactions, some chance, a few more intimate, with the blind, those aforementioned librarians and his psychoanalyst Joe assigned to Parsifal following the lad's heinous crime (Parsifal set fire to his Happy Bunny Preschool).

Back on dreams and death. A librarian once shared a story with Parsifal about a man who was forced to spend the night in a graveyard. The man comes upon a fat ghost and a thin ghost in a heated argument. The thin ghost insists the man be the judge. After giving their respective positions careful consideration, the man judges in favor of the thin ghost. The fat ghost becomes so outraged, he bites off the man’s arm and gobbles it down then and there. The thin ghost is moved to take his own ghost arm and give it to the man. And so it continues throughout the entire night: fatty eats a body part and the thin ghost immediately replaces it. In the morning, the man is still conscious and can move all his body parts but he can’t be sure how much of him is man and how much is ghost. So the question posed by the story is: how much are any of us flesh (present) and how much ghost (past)? Parsifal thinks to himself, How much flesh, and how much scar?

Parsifal - combination left field quirky and deeply moving meditation on a sensitive man's sadness and pain as he searches for love in a world raining car parts and plumbing supplies.


American author Jim Krusoe, born 1943