Mr. Eternity

June 27, 2016
In Key West, two budding documentarians find a willing subject in the “ancient mariner” Daniel Defoe, who claims to be 560 years old, in Thier’s second novel (after The Ghost Apple). Not only is Defoe telling the truth about his longevity, his life has only just begun. We flash back to 16th-century Granada, where Defoe is a conquistador searching for the fabled El Dorado, then forward into our future (approximately 2216) and Defoe’s quest for his long-lost love Anna Gloria among the ruins of America. In 1750, he is a guest on a plantation in the Bahamas with his faithful companion Quaco (who plays Sancho Panza to the adventurer Defoe’s Quixote), and in the year 2500 he is advisor to the ruler of the Mississippi States; each story line follows a different narrator and a different style, but Defoe himself is constant, voyaging through the echelons of power, sometimes a servant, occasionally a pirate, always a raconteur. Defoe regales his documentarians with recollections of Christopher Columbus; in the future, he recalls a 20th century long forgotten. Thier uses his deathless protagonist to chart the rise and fall of the American empire, and also those certainties—love, trade—that afflict every age. The novel can be jarring in its narrative jumps, but the moral imagination behind Defoe’s adventures rivals that of his namesake, begging comparison to the best literature has to offer. Agent: Cynthia Cannell, Cynthia Cannell Literary Agency.

June 15, 2016
Thier (The Ghost Apple, 2014) sends Daniel Defoe, a 560-year-old Spaniard, wandering across centuries as the world wages wars, civilizations are raped, and human societies are swamped by global warming.A simple fellow who tells folks that the secret to eternal life is not dying, Defoe lives as a mirror rather than a narrative-driving hero. All he desires in his millennial-long quest is to find his true love, Anna Gloria, again. In 1560, Defoe joins explorers guided by a Pirahao aboriginal girl, trapped as a colonial mayor's mistress, into Amazon-like wilds in search of treasure. In 1750, he becomes Dr. Dan on Little Salt, a Caribbean island, where John Green, a mulatto intent on passing as white, lurks on a failed sugar plantation. In 2016, two young filmmakers, propelled by drugs and irony, set out to make a documentary about the ancient mariner. In 2200, Defoe becomes a guide to buried treasure, a roguish tale narrated in rambling Faulkner-ian exposition by a young fellow called Jam. In 2500, where once stood St. Louis, now land "hot enough to fry an ape," Defoe encounters Jasmine St. Roulette, daughter of the hereditary king and president of the Democratic Federation of Mississippi States. The tales explore the ugliness of slavery, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, and the ubiquity of greed. Throughout, Thier riffs on multiple themes: the evolution of history from fact to legend--"imagination and memory were all confounded one with the other"; how language constructs reality; and how, as the protagonists in our own stories, we "struggle with the meaning of story." With symbolism and analogy, surrealism and fantasy, Thier deftly reflects on and explores the human condition through "the lavender light and sweet scented dust of history." Erudite. Imaginative. A work to be read slowly and savored.

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July 1, 2016
Thier's follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Ghost Apple (2014), whimsically surveys man's relationship with history and the environment. By the year 2500 in America, automobiles and plastics are relics of the past, slavery has been reinstitutionalized, Mississippi is a tropical kingdom-state, and New York City is underwater. An ancient mariner named Daniel Defoe, alive for over 1,000 years, inspires his fellow travelers with adventurous tales about witnessing the world change and change back again. In 1560, he races against Christian conquistadors to find El Dorado, accompanied by a girl from a remote Brazilian tribe. In 1750, he helps liberate the offspring of a slave and her master in the Bahamas. And in 2200, he journeys from Boston to Florida seeking his estranged girlfriend, alongside an orphan who craves now-extinct conveniences like bug spray and air conditioning. Caught in the middle, in 2016, are two college dropouts who hope capturing Old Dan in a documentary film will jump-start their futures. As Thier's story lines entwine in Faulknerian brilliance, the past, present, and future become indistinguishable, making for an enchanting, humorous, and visionary experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)