The Seventeenth Involucrum

1962: An English alpinist with three doctorates, and a book published on the notoriously difficult Finnegans Wake of James Joyce, accepts a tenure track position in literature and philosophy at Winslow Homer University, Bar Harbor, Maine. Determined to approach the ’New World’ of America as an alpinist, first, and as an intellect second, Zoltan von Symogy takes to roaming the Maine forests while awaiting commencement of his teaching duties. While he is savoring what is to be his new home, a 57 Chevy with a dark, mysterious beatnik mom at the wheel, and a very bright, straitlaced collegiate daughter with her, pull up alongside the extraordinary spectacle of a man marching along in traditional alpine costume. Their conversation immediately becomes complex and sustained; implying something more going on than is readily apparent. The mother, Foscarina, is a medievalist at the university; and her daughter, Ascyllalolyssa, proves unusually adept as do all three of them, at speaking Occitan, Ancien Francais, and Chaucerian English, as a natural matter of course. The ladies persuade Professor von Symogy to become a boarder at their isolated sylvan residence hall. What ensues is essentially a domestic marriage drama, after Jane Austen. Von Symogy becomes enamored of the mom; but as the increasingly paranormal events of the narrative establish, Foscarina is anything but a normal human being, and is being sought by several ethereal antagonists, who are aware that something called ’the seventeenth involucrum’ has been hidden ’inside’ her, and they want to take her away, very far away, to get it back. Zoltan and Ascyllalolyssa hold extensive conversation all through the book; and she explains that her mother is a ’special case’, strictly speaking not available to Zoltan; and as the narrative progresses through events involving encounters with paleofauna and ’extra’ dimensionalities, what becomes exceedingly clear is that Ascylla and Zoltan are very well meant for each other. Zoltan finds that his students already seem to know him, and await his commands. Von Symogy learns that during antiquity, distinguished himself to a significant group of educated women by for decades copying out books of philosophy and literature and smuggling them, at mortal risk to himself, to the ladies: and so he has a sort of ’permanent good reputation’ for this action. Von Symogy only partially understands what is happening to him, and that is half the fun of the book.