Baldr and Beatrice

A rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and love, Mark Seinfelt's "Baldr and Beatrice"--a novel at turns philosophical, allegorical, mythical and spiritual--revisits the old, time-proven narrative formula of girl and boy forever desiring but never fully achieving the culmination of their love. Here, it is a matter of their accidental disuniting as primordial essences, depicted in grand Miltonic flourishes, through severing time warps and their reemergence in different times, places, and cultures. As the novel opens, in the Upper Circles or the eternal Summerlands, Baldr and Beatrice's spirits, prior to their incarnation on earth, decide to make the happy fall out of the fixed and higher realm to partake directly in the All Highest's continuous act of kaleidoscopic creation and to perform as agents of that creation, something that can occur only in the sublunary world. They chose to take their births in the Langraviate of Thuringia in medieval, semi-pagan Germany. However, a spiteful shadow-being diverts Baldr elsewhere, to indigenous "Indian" America, where he is adopted by the Ho-Chunk deity Red Horn. As a young girl, Beatrice inadvertently summons his unborn soul to her across space and time when she enters a witches' circle cast by her grandmother Oma, who practices the old ways despite the interdiction of her son, the Christian Landgrave. For a time, as children, the spirit boy and the flesh-and-blood girl lead an idyllic existence, but circumstances force Oma to separate them and to send Baldr back to Indian America, where he appears now as a human boy but casts no shadow. As Baldr grows to manhood (generations of Indians live and die in the interval), wave after wave of white settlers begin pouring into the pristine Indian territory. Red Horn realizes that the world is out of balance because of Baldr's separation from Beatrice and aids his son in returning to medieval Thuringia, where tragedy ensues because of Baldr's lack of a shadow. The grotesque admixture of prevailing superstition and custom with new faith is depicted in both European and American spheres in this sad, comic, tears-through-chuckles tale. "Baldr and Beatrice" exemplifies the very best in narrative art, combining wit, imagination, history, and insight into the nature of love, and discloses the influence of such beloved latter-day American authors as Barth, Vonnegut, West, and Pynchon. Indeed Paul West says of "Baldr and Beatrice": "It invokes Thomas Mann and the sermons of John Donne. How does Mr. Seinfelt do it? By keeping it all in his head, as if the whole novel were to come alive again and swamp the remainder? I wish to congratulate the author on the splendiferous plentitude that always keeps itself from excess." Al Galasso of the North American Bookdealers Exchange also hails the novel: "Award-winning author Mark Seinfelt has taken his descriptive talents to an unusual new work entitled 'Baldr and Beatrice.' It takes readers on a time machine into the human psyche."