Vanita & Joe Monk’s Antarctica is the literary autobiography of the world-famous couple Dr. Truth and Glass Bride, a love story that exploded, a confession to crimes against romance and literature, a living myth more real than the true story and stranger than most fiction.
Two lovers who once shared a womb, two virgins known only as "We", are condemned to be poisoned and torn apart into "You" and "I" for corrupting the elderly as well as the youth of an archetypal village called City. After finding out that the only escape from the village is death, the twins now separated both set out across the Mountains of Fear that surround the village, in search of that long lost other half that once fit "like a knife in a wound". Two lovers together at last soon realize that finding each other across oceans and centuries was easy compared to what lies ahead, and that the only escape from the age-old relationship problem is to murder the relationship itself. A two-headed writer finds out that the only way not to write "just another three-minute love song" is to write all that love is not, because whatever fits in words also fits in heads that will always poison it with everything they already know.
A story fragmented but unbroken; a secret diary of taboo fantasies and shamelessly tender little noises; a picaresque adventure of weeds surviving between the cracks in the pavement ("slipping from one personality into the next at will, like you’re changing clothes or reincarnating"); a constitution for a country where no one lives; a draft for a holy scripture ("the Devil invented sex to make God laugh, and God invented religion to make the Devil laugh"); a play within a comic book within an album of songs; a novel made out of meridians scratched across the surface of a globe, all pointing towards the same elusive pole; and perhaps even the definitive answer to that timeless riddle, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Vanita & Joe Monk’s Antarctica is not a location you will find on any map. Most storytellers are content to describe a world they had no part in creating. Only rarely will you hear of those who actually live inside the mythology of their own making, a beautiful wasteland they are inviting you to visit. Vanita & Joe Monk’s Antarctica is such a place.
Click here for a detailed (chapter by chapter) synopsis.
Table of contents (click on a title to read an excerpt):
- Dirty Words
- Dirty Life #1
- Art For The Millions
- Dirty Life #2
- A Dome Of Lenses
- Dirty Life #3
- The Object
- A Bucket Full Of Broken Glass
- Wet Grass
- Dirty Life #4
- Dirty Life #5
- Songs In The Wrong Key
- Dirty Life #6
- The Mud Is The Flower
- Escape From The Village Called City
- Dirty Life #7
- Opus Below Zero
- Return To Mount Terror
Biographical note about the authors
Contact: monx {at} monastery {dot} nl
