Cadenza

Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world that was. First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and orders out—sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.