The Celibate

by Michael Arditti

Overview

The Celibate is the story of a young, unnamed ordinand with his mind full of God and his heart closed to love. "An exceptional book: at its core it combines the sexual with the spiritual."-Sunday Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906413224
Publisher:	Arcadia Books Ltd
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic. His novels are The Celibate (1993), Pagan and her Parents - Pagan’s Father in the USA (1996), Easter (2000), Unity (2005), A Sea Change (2006), The Enemy of the Good (2009), Jubilate (2011) and The Breath of Night (2013). His short story collection, Good Clean Fun was published in 2004. He was awarded a Harold Hyam Wingate scholarship in 2000, a Royal Literary Fund fellowship in 2001, an Oppenheim-John Downes memorial award in 2003, and Arts Council awards in 2004 and 2007. He was the Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum in 2008. His novels have been short- and long-listed for several literary awards and Easter won the inaugural Waterstone’s Mardi Gras award. In 2012 he was awarded an Honorary DLitt by the University of Chester.

Editorial Reviews

Explores important themes among them the role of sexuality in spiritual development.

New York Times Book Review

This overambitious couch confessional seeks out parallels between the spiritual and sexual odyssey of its unnamed gay narrator (born into a repressive Jewish household, he flees into the uneasy embrace of the Catholic church) and two historical catastrophes: Jack the Ripper's 1888 serial-murders and the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague. After suffering a nervous breakdown at the altar, the narrator has been forced to drop his duties as a priest, enter psychoanalysis and take a job as a walking-tour guide. By turns defensive, glib and self-loathing, he wavers between the story of his troubled life and the historical anecdotes that he takes so much to heart. Unfortunately, Arditti's (Pagan's Father) serious themes are at odds with a superficial style inappropriately crammed with showy wordplay and stagey asides. Worse, the historical set pieces never justify their place in the narrator's tale. In the book's first half, they strain to connect the narrator's nave sexual experiences (with East End rent-boys and pimps) to Jack the Ripper's mutilations ("male sexuality at its most appalling extreme"). In the second half, the history lectures work better, as a village's endurance of the plague stands for the narrator's personal suffering during the AIDS epidemic. Still, if the narrator is, as one hustler puts it, "a spiritual voyeur... a praying Tom," he doesn't entice the reader into watching along. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This novel is the tale of a novice priest who suffers a nervous breakdown during mass. Ensuing psychoanalysis reveals his hatred of the church, his latent homosexuality, his realized homosexuality, and his torrid affair with a male prostitute named Jack who baptizes him in the faith, so to speak, with a shower of urine. And this is just part of what the novel offers. In what the author no doubt believes is clever counterpoint, the psychoanalytical monologs are interspersed with a second stream of monologs from the troubled priest's day job as a tour guide of Jack the Ripper's murder sites. At this point, Dave Barry would feel compelled to say, "I'm not making this up." Unfortunately, Arditti (Pagan's Father, LJ 8/96) is, and he has produced an astonishingly bad story. In fact, this novel's very existence strains credulity. Not recommended.Paul Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.

Library Journal