Time of Exile (TOE), the long awaited third and closing volume in Gaither Stewart’s Europa Trilogy was recently published by our Trepper & Katz imprint. Distribution is being carried out by Ingram/LSI, with Amazon as the chief domestic and international retailer. Robert Prudice is in charge of top tier market coordination.
Like much of the Europa Trilogy, TOE is an absorbing novel whose narrative develops against the backdrop of a world dominated by the struggle between the Western “way of life”, soaked in American and political cultural values, and a world that refuses to adopt such an anti-humanist corporate template and chooses to build its own separate identity.
Reviews so far have been almost uniformly enthusiastic. Notably, despite its obvious lyricism, some critics have called TOE an overly “didactic” book. Others have praised the trilogy precisely for that reason. In the opening pages, critic Aleksandr Tarasov, who reviewed the book in its pre-publication stage, tackled this issue head on:
TIME OF EXILE, the third volume of Gaither Stewart’s Europe Trilogy, is a political novel. I see no reasons to conceal it or to feel shame. On the contrary.
Are the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Miguel Angel Asturias not political? And worthy of the Nobel Prize.
Of course one may say that those are not Anglo-American literature, but Latin American. Still, as if the novels of Graham Greene were not political. As if Hemingway’s best novels were not political. As if The Grapes of Wrath, All the Kings Men, and Catch-22 were not political novels.
Only fools and cowards can turn up their noses at the political novel in today’s world in which neo-liberals have created a huge economic crisis, in a world in which NATO blatantly organizes one aggression after another—against Yugoslavia, against Iraq, against Afghanistan, against Libya, against Cote d’Ivoire—overthrows disagreeable governments and installs in their place marionettes. That is, in a world governed by rotten politics.
Another prominent reviewer, James P. Miller, reflecting well the nature of this volume, notes:
There is no surprise that Gaither Stewart’s final volume in the Europe trilogy is the best of the lot. His long awaited prose is carefully crafted to evoke a sense of loss and fear that an expatriate or more adequately an “exile” can only experience– something vividly real in Stewart which hovers over the surface of the book. Stewart is the exile and chooses to defend his literary life with this volume.
His exposure of recent political crimes against humanity and the absolute slash and burn politics of western imperialism across the globe are certainly not incidental. And,WE are actors in this debacle of loss just as Elmer Redway is its catalyst.
All good novels set before the protagonist a choice. Choose the right thing (we hardly even have an idea what that means anymore) or join the herd of jackals and continue to bring humanity down to the Hobbesian level until it disappears (Social Darwinism).
For more information on this title, please contact R. Prudice at RobertoPrudiceTROM@puntopress.com
Time of Exile
A novel
(Volume 3 of Europe Trilogy)
By Gaither Stewart
Punto Press/ Trepper & Katz (2015)
374 pp
