Sun Eye Moon Eye
by Vincent Czyz
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Pub Date 19 Mar 2024 | Archive Date 6 Jun 2024
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Description
Sun Eye Moon Eye centers around Logan Blackfeather, a musician of mixed Hopi descent, whose faulty sense of direction sends him spiraling through the mid-'80s.
The novel opens with Logan crossing a stretch of Arizona desert, his thumb out for a ride and most of what he owns in a bag slung over a shoulder. By this time he has suffered a breakdown and given up music.
A knife fight in the parking lot of a roadside bar ends in the death of a trucker, and in short order Logan finds himself in a psychiatric hospital in New York. He makes his way to Manhattan, where he's as bewildered by the fluorescent-colored spikes of punks as he is by the upturned collars of yuppies.
A job as a piano man in a Village bar eases him back into music, and he falls into a turbulent relationship with a successful ad executive.
Haunted by a dead father who comes to him in dreams, by the killing of the trucker, and memories of his violent uncle/stepfather, Logan is caught between tradition and modernity, the rural and the urban, his Anglo and Native American ancestries.
Myth and dream play key roles in reconstructing Logan's worldview, and he begins to suspect that empirical reality is as open to interpretation as the dream world.
Advance Praise
"Captivating ... a lyrical masterpiece." --Seattle Book Review
"A splendidly compelling and unique narrative voice." — R. Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
"Readers and libraries seeking powerful descriptive language, a stark contrast between past and present worlds, and influences that drive a fallen character to envision new beginnings ... will relish the atmospheric, evocative words that permeate Sun Eye Moon Eye." --Midwest Book Review
“Czyz is more than a bit mystical; indeed, he searches for rapture … What he’s really after, however, is to find mystery within mystery, to have experiences he cannot live without yet cannot pin down.”
—Paul West, author of The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests
“Deeply romantic (in the best sense) and darkly evocative, Czyz’s lush style explores regions well beyond simple narrative, probing the constantly shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory and the forever-incomplete nature of human desire. A moody, gorgeous and formally innovative collection, Adrift in a Vanishing City deserves a wide audience among readers who understand that fiction is about more than getting a character from one room to the next.” —Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times
Featured Reviews
Ink R, Reviewer
Sun Eye Moon Eye is a masterpiece. I want to say it is reminiscent of Hunter S Thompson, but this book goes far, far beyond that (and that is a compliment I do not give lightly) In this sense, myths and dreams take the place of hallucinations, personal trauma is the catalyst, ancestry the anchor
Logan Blackfeather is mixed Hopi descent and he is on a journey to rebuild following a breakdown. However, it is the 80s and paths rarely run smoothly when you are not where you feel you should be and have no idea how to get there in the first place. A manslaughter, institutionalisation, trends and fashions, all follow Logan as he tries to navigate his way to some semblance of stability in Manhattan where he finds a job as a pianist and begins a relationship with an ad executive that is really not good for his state of mind
Vincent Czyz has a unique narrative and his lyrical descriptions are mesmerising. He is philosophising on a different level, experiencing a deeper understanding of what most see on the surface. Broadly descriptive, constructive, illustrative. A truly gifted writer
Thank you very much to Netgalley, BooksGoSocial and Vincent Czyz for this incredible ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own
David T, Reviewer
Sun Eye Moon Eye is Vincent Czyz’s third novel now available from Spuyten Duyvil. Consistent is Czyz’s use of mythic space, most particularly that tread by Logan Blackfeather, a mixed Hopi man whose wanderings span coast to coast. He is at once an enfant terrible on an indie label, a street wizened knife fighter, an asylum inmate, and Hamlet haunted son of a man replaced by his uncle. Accenting his dividedness are the various geographies of his story. We may survey the Ghost Dancers from the lap of his grandfather, the sea-like fields of Kansas he came to, and the modern Canyonlands of the Manhattan skyline where Logan sees the Katsinas dance.
In complement to the complex characterization of Logan are the mix of genres from which Sun Eye Moon Eye derive. It could certainly be a developmental novel in Logan’s aim to find some sense of home and vocation. It might also be tagged as another life of the artist account. With two crimes woven into the story, Czyz’s novel might also be understood as Native American noir. Finally, and my personal favorite, it is the story Chief Bromden’s reticent, crafty Chief might have told in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Milos Forman, 1975) had he been prompted to do so. I sense Bromden prompted Czyz, who in turn prompts us all to find that most productive, affirming union of our ordering suns and intuitive moons.
