Amazon.com description: Product Description: Passacaglia is an analytical novel, an expedition into history, love and memory, at once a meticulously-knit narrative woven of multi-colored threads, at once a poetic feat of strength—a uniquely readable and virtuosic work. Passacaglia is a tapestry woven of five different strands, organized rhythmically by the mathematics of site-shifting (the same mathematics that governs juggling, gearing patterns and musical canon). Passacaglia's narrative threads, thematically diverse, interrelate to each other mysteriously… and the site-shifting function itself—9-1-4-7-3-4-9-1-4-7-3-6 etc.—becomes a musical leitmotif throughout the novel, simultaneously coloring it and governing it. Time-bending, poetically stylized, passionate, quirky and erudite, Passacaglia promises to combine popular appeal with critical acclaim, skillfully shifting between the many sites and modes of memory and love, a tightly-structured airspace crisscrossed with five distinct, crisp trajectories: • The boy-king Philippe-Auguste, the world arrayed against him, embarks on a baroque path of inspired statecraft and blind brinksmanship to retake Aquitaine and his beloved Eleanor; historically precise and tirelessly researched, this is the untold story of one of history’s greatest underdogs. • Distant in time and place, Vicus' mind escapes his failed marriage and plunges into a maze of memory, the darkly-lit and depopulate theater of his past, navigating as if it were a wide cold city, indifferent and dark. • Failed patriot Perugia escapes the capital, carrying the Mona Lisa away in his suitcase. Fallen in now among thieves and poets, the deep past haunts him; a phantasmagoria of absinth, sex andjustice for a heretic queen confronts him; he is as besotted with the -idea- of his mission as he is with the mission itself, as enamored with his suitcase as with the masterpiece it contains. • The present-day Lover (the one possible salvation for the hapless Vicus) finds his ageless Eleanor, singing love, desire and loss, the Poet of a lost tradition transposed to the modern day and, wading into a sea of words both sensuous and timeless, makes her immortal. • Weaverwoman Havoise is altogether too entangled in time, encumbered by memory. Married off as a child to William the Conqueror’s chief advisor Torsten, she is the mute witness to triumph and atrocity alike. Passacaglia’s Norn, she weaves the threads of memory—doom, longing, awe, horror, the acts of men and the fates of nations—into a single, unified tapestry. Passacaglia is lit with the contrary refractions of retrograde- and future-memory, bounded by frames without paintings, peopled by beings who cross over without hope of ever crossing back—cinematic in scope, tender, wicked, heartrending, shot through with breathtaking wordplay and death-defying numerology. It is the definitive hymn to the Fanatic: the thief, the dispossessed king, the ancient worthy matron, the inspired paramour. Passacaglia is a multiverse haunted by loners and lovers, lunatics and visionaries, each driven to “redouble their efforts when they have forgotten their aim” (Santayana).