The museum of love

A hallucinatory and startlingly powerful first novel, a darkly visionary On the Road for the upcoming millennium, The Museum of Love traces the macabre and compelling journey of a young French Canadian from his oppressive home town on the shores of Lake Superior across North America. His father is a morbid prison guard, his mother a mystical Catholic, his brother an adolescent saint and martyr while he, an innocent and receptive vessel, fiercely intelligent, anti-religious and tentatively homosexual, inhabits a vivid and strangely lit yet oddly recognizable world - the one that exists only on the inside of a dreamer's eyelids, between the bed and the wall. As Jean-Michel Verhaeren makes his surreal journey of madness and freedom, he experiences the walking wounded, suicides of friends, hostile geographies and periodic moments of extreme clarity - ecstatic visits to the Museums of Negritude, Religion, Love and Death. A work of phantasmagorias and ecstasies, of brutality and tenderness, The Museum of Love is an extraordinary debut.