The Inquisitor's Tongue
272 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
1 illus.
Paperback
Release Date:06 Mar 2012
ISBN:9781573661676
Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities.
The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity.
In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity.
Beautifully erudite, ornate, and appalling, The Inquisitor’s Tongue’s doublehelixed narrative explores the intricate ligatures among brutality, art, artifice, taste, bliss, and the disease of consciousness called selfhood, proving once again that Alan Singer is the virtuoso of avant-decadence.’—Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets
Alan Singer is the author of four previous novels, most recently Dirtmouth. He also writes on aesthetics and the visual arts; his most recent work is The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art. Singer is professor of English at Temple University.
