Fin

FIN is a near magical tale with a deft comic touch, composed of three inter-related novellas (THE MANDALA SOCIETY, PAVANNE FOR THE SELFISH GENE, and THE DINNER PARTY) with recurring, vividly real characters and Fin, named after the American five dollar bill, as the common, unifying narrator. He is a wealthy Canadian idler claiming, for lack of better, to be an amateur theologian ("never been proven wrong") while traveling the U.S. and the wilder shores of love with varying results. He explores San Francisco and its elites, a Vermont academic world featuring murder most foul and the Lake Champlain monster, and Greater Boston super-achievers, all at the dawn of the disorienting twenty first century. To quote Russell Banks, "Alonso is, before all else, an artist...we cannot separate his metaphysics any more than we can from Wallace Stevens." And to quote from Lyle Rexer, "I envy everyone coming to Juan Alonso's work for the first time. Their heads will be buzzing and their moral sensibilities challenged, and it won't even hurt. My hope is that this volume heralds an Alonso revival bringing past writings into the main stream and his current work into the spotlight, where it belongs."