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'Every household in Ireland should have a copy of this magical book. I am indulging in no idle hyperbole when I say that this autobiography is one of the most remakable autobiographies I have ever read in my entire life. - PAUL DURCAN, TODAY WITH PAT KENNY
'In Nostos Moriarty has surpassed all his previous achievements. Because it is in the recording of his life, that his passionate imagination finally makes sense, and here he has recorded his life expansively and clearly and movingly. It is written in exquisite Irish-English, it's a unique voice, and it sings through in every page of a beautifully made book.' - MICHAEL HARDING, SUNDAY TRIBUNE
'Here is a larger-than-life book from a larger-than-life life. The autobiography becomes a treasure trove of quotations, of poems and stories, of myths and legends, all tending towards an understanding of where we come from, who we are, and where we ought to be going. The patient reader of this book will warm to a generous spirit, to a mind and body devoted to healing the ills of the present by pointing to the past. The dull and dulling events of the life of a man intent on understanding are brought alive in this huge achievement in such a way that will move you with a belief that humanity has a meaning and relevance that can yet beautify our egotistical and polluted world. - JOHN F. DEANE, IRISH INDEPENDENT
'Clear days bring the mountains down to my door-step, calm nights give the rivers their say, the wind puts its hand to my shoulder some evenings, and then I don't think, I just leave what I'm doing and I go the soul's way.'
In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty's earlier works of mystical philosophy, Dreamtime and Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, are given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding, reconciling them gloriously within the arc of his life.
Nostos is a Greek word meaning 'homecoming'. In its plural form, nostoi, it was the name of an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. Most of this literature has perished, but we do have The Odyssey, describing the long homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca. Moriarty's book assumes that for various reasons humanity is now exiled from the earth, but by reimagining it and ourselves as involved in a common destiny, it enacts a homecoming, a nostos to it.
In pursuit of this enterprise the book unwinds, or better it suffers, an Ariadne's skein of sponsoring and enabling myths, not all of them indigenous, some of them inaugurating an alternative to our Western way. Nostos is a continuous narrative describing early on how its author lost his world as surely and completely as the Aztecs lost theirs when Cortez came ashore. Thereafter, in places as far apart as neolithic North Kerry and London, Periclean Athens and Blackfoot Dancing Ground, Manitoba and Mexico, Kwakiutl coast and Connemara, the author fights his way to a kind of rest, to a requiem, at the heart of things as they terribly and resplendently are. Overall, Nostos is a book that challenges us to be who we claim to be, Homo sapiens sapiens.
'The classical, Eastern and Amer-Indian legends that have informed Moriarty's life are recreated or re-enacted in this deeply personal document, which is paradoxically rich in encounters with the physical world and tender episodes of love and loss, while giving us a disturbing insight into the terrors and rare ecstasies of the hermit's lonely struggle.'- TIM ROBINSON
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