Alexander Motyl’s latest novel, “Ardor” has just appeared with Anaphora Literary Press.
A political, social and intellectual satire, “Ardor” pokes fun at the overblown pretensions of professors, poets, journalists, policy-makers, businesspeople and foundation officers, and features none other than Viktor Yanukovych as one of its central characters.
The hero of the novel is Chester Milosz, a very minor American poet who teaches at a very minor American college and aspires to win the Nobel Prize. One day, Milosz receives an invitation to a meeting of global high-flyers at the Otto Nabokov Foundation’s Ardor Haus estate in Caravaggio, Italy. The organizers are Dickey Lemon, a British billionaire who made his fortune in hamster bedding, and Joe Zsasz, an ex-communist functionary-turned-international consultant. The participants are a sundry collection of businesspeople, policy-makers, journalists and academics involved in shady dealings with a corrupt Eastern European president who closely resembles Viktor Yanukovych.
Chester decides to go in the hope that a trip to northern Italy will help overcome his writer’s block. While at Ardor Haus, he experiences cultural misunderstandings, comic misadventures, near-encounters with inspiration and three earthquakes. It eventually dawns on Chester that he’s been confused with the Polish Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz, and that the conference is an elaborate scam centered on Yanukovych. After a major earthquake destroys Caravaggio, Chester finds his Muse on the rooftop of the Duomo in Milan.
“Like all satires,” says Prof. Motyl, “‘Ardor’ isn’t just trying to be funny. It’s actually a commentary on the absurdly overblown pretensions, hypocrisy, criminality, venality, and stupidity of most global elites. Yanukovych is feted, cheered and admired by the characters populating the novel, not despite, but because of his dimwitted arrogance, boorishness and chutzpah. In that sense, Yanukovych is a stand-in for a whole class of highly influential people who walk the streets of New York, London and Paris as much as they crawl in the sewers of Kyiv, Donetsk and Luhansk.”
“By the way,” adds the author, “many of the characters, dialogues, and scenes were drawn from life. The stupidity ‘Ardor’ exposes is real, not imagined.”
Prof. Motyl is a writer, painter and professor. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008 and 2013, he is the author of eight novels, “Whiskey Priest,” “Who Killed Andrei Warhol,” “Flippancy,” “The Jew Who Was Ukrainian,” “My Orchidia,” “Sweet Snow,” “Fall River” and “Vovochka,” and a collection of poetry, “Vanishing Points.”
His artwork has been shown in solo and group shows in New York City, Philadelphia and Toronto and is part of the permanent collection of two museums. Prof. Motyl teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and is the author of six academic books and numerous articles.
Prof. Motyl will be presenting “Ardor” as well as his newly published collection of poetry, “Vanishing Points,” at the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in Jenkintown, Pa., on Sunday, October 9, and at The Ukrainian Museum in New York on Saturday, October 15.
“Ardor” is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.