The Plotinus

by Rikki Ducornet

Overview

Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination.

Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group’s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom’s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet’s most unforgettable story yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566896818
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Series:	NVLA
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

The author of nine novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Widely published abroad, Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits internationally. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Plotinus

“Dashingly absurd. . . . Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. . . . An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.” —Kirkus, starred review

“When all the beauty left in a denuded world is concentrated in the delicate body of a visiting hornet, what else is there for a narrator (or for us) to do but love her. So The Plotinus shows us. This book is elegant, hilarious, ominous, and transcendent.” —Rae Armantrout

“So new, so strange. . . . It enthralled me.” —Forrest Gander

From the Publisher

★ 2023-04-24
Imprisoned for his lack of streamlined perfection, a subversive eco-guru (or perhaps ordinary human man) finds solace in the minute remnants of the natural world that infiltrate his cell.

The narrator of this dashingly absurd novel has been imprisoned for the crime of appearing outside his dwelling in possession of a “knobby stick” whose organic imperfections offend the robot Plotinus, which apprehends him. Stripped of his coveralls, shoes, socks, and stick, the narrator is flung into a closet whose only aperture aside from the locked door is an air vent set high up in the wall. Here he is attended solely by the Plotinus, who arrives clanging and screeching to deliver ancient breakfast rolls or punish forbidden hoarding of dust and twigs. Rather than succumbing to his deprivations, however, the narrator sets himself the task of “consider[ing] the positive aspects of exile and of [his] diminished circumstances,” as he raps his knuckles against the air vent in the coded sequences that translate into the novel. In addition to the Plotinus, the narrator has another caller: the gullible Vector, who, “cloaked in his Ginza and treading air,” pops in to marvel over the narrator’s own organic knobbiness and quest to become “a thing that knows nothing beyond what it is.” The narrator fully expects to spend his incarceration, which will surely equate to the rest of his life, trading the pseudo-mysticism of his memories with the Vector for the twigs, sacks, and crumbs the Plotinus will shortly discover and whisk away. But then a third entity enters his orbit: a hornet who flies in through the air vent and stings him on the knuckle. The insect, whom he names Smaragdos, becomes the central focus of the narrator’s impressive powers of attention and offers a way of reinhabiting the world outside his closet. Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. Ultimately, whether or not the Plotinus succeeds in breaking our narrator’s spirit, the Vector succeeds in mythologizing his failing body, or Smaragdos succeeds in living her alien life alongside his own, the reader is assured that what will be left for us is the truism that “the poor will inherit the earth. (Such as it is.)”

An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.

Kirkus Reviews