John Wallen

Calypso of the Appenine Way John Wallen

"Calypso of the Appenine Way" is, on one level, a novel about obsessive love. However, it is also much more than this, possessing a subtext about the futility of any hunt for perfection and the inevitability of disillusionment when myth clashes with reality. The novel subtly subverts the reader's expectations and, in spite of the clear appreciation of the chaos that passion can bring, a profound ambiguity is consistently maintained between the impossibility of loving the other as he or she really is and the great power and strength which is conferred by the very act of loving passionately. In this compelling novel, John Wallen sets up a series of binary oppositions such as "love-anti-love," "sincerity-cynicism," "reality-myth," "bravery-foolhardiness" and allows these individual themes to act freely upon each other in a profound process of literary subversion.