Book Review | ‘Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest: a novel’ by Chuck Rosenthal

For a novel of only 89 pages, Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest is surprisingly deep, and will appeal to readers familiar with the Romantic movement as well as those who just want to be carried away by a good story. Chuck Rosenthal has produced a large corpus of work, many novels, a memoir, and essays. He possesses an agile imagination, an eye for telling detail, and an ear for dialogue, and he gives readers a sense of the mad passions that drove Keats, Shelley, and Byron.

Beatriz is 19 and her life is directionless when we first encounter her. She’s the daughter of academics who live a comfortable life in Venice, California, but she’s working as an unpaid volunteer at Beyond Baroque, a “citadel of poetry, of poets,” on Venice Boulevard, part bookstore, part art gallery, and another feature in the garden out back, at the bottom of a stairway: A mysterious repository crammed with thousands of old books. There’s no electricity in this strange catacomb, no cell reception, and electronic devices like laptops do not function. Same for flashlights.

Haunted? Beatriz’s colleagues think so. Pad, pencil, and kerosene lamp in hand, Beatriz takes on the task of cataloging all the old books. But from the moment she enters the catacomb and closes the door behind her, she’s drawn into a disorientating world where authors spring to life and the shackles of time break. The first person she encounters is Mary Shelley, of Frankenstein fame, who tells her matter of factly that she must start with Keats. “If you want truth and beauty, follow me,” says Mary Shelley. “If you want knowledge, go back to school.”

Beatriz time travels, first with Keats in Scotland, though the poet is quick to point out that we don’t travel in time, “we travel inside what we are, what we were. No more.” Soon thereafter, Beatriz finds herself walking across France with Percy Bysshe Shelley and others on their way to Italy to hook up with Byron and his entourage. More adventures follow, on land and at sea, but back at Beyond Baroque reality reasserts itself when the catacomb and all it contains is slated for demolition.

Can Beatriz stop it? I won’t spoil the ending. Let’s just say it’s “Written out on the thread dangling between beauty and horror, between the made up and the real … ”

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.