Matthias Stockenström – the pseudonym used by musician, bread-baker, bread-baking teacher, former clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, Graeme Taute – is a literary novelist working at the coalface of what it might mean to be human. Interweaving theological, philosophical, psychological, musical and poetical precepts with poignant storytelling, Stockenström lays bare the dilemma of the post-modern novelist, viz. how to tell stories when stories themselves refuse to cohere.


What emerges will baffle and perplex you. 


Here you will find writing that does not submit to being consumed. Here you will find storytelling that refuses to yield to custom. Here you will find meanings that do not reveal themselves except obliquely, and even then you'll have to surrender to being disturbed.


And here, Stockenström maddeningly seems to imply, is where the work of reading – and writing – begins. 


TOM SOLEMN – A BIOGRAPHY: THE ANATOMY OF A DEATH is his first novel.


What’s it all about? they ask.

The nature of God’s death? you venture. The birth of storytelling?

Yet, what are we to do with all that luck and happy chance?


Tom Solemn – A Biography: The Anatomy of a Death is a literary novel exploring the nature of creativity as it – creativity – relates to dying and death. Daringly situating both dying and death beyond the demonising language of destruction, Matthias Stockenström challenges the reader to reimagine the work of being alive. He engages compositional structures more commonly the preserve of music. He engages a language style more commonly the preserve of the spoken word. He engages rhythmic idioms more commonly the preserve of poetry. What emerges might be described as a tone poem of sorts. But what is the novel about? A man grieving for a dead son? A monk unable to believe in God? An abandoned boy finding solace in a monastery? A group of itinerant women quarrying rock? A man living alone on a farm, a crow, a horse, a lamb, a pig and a donkey his only companions?

    Yet who is Tom Solemn? And will it ever matter? When you're up against eternity, you don't stand a chance. 





ORDER YOUR COPY:

https://publisher.co.za/product/tom-solemn-a-biography-the-anatomy-of-death/


CONTACT THE WRITER:

matthiasstockenstrom@matthiasstockenstrom.co.za