Genre: Book
Grade: A-
Notable People: James Lee Burke
Title: A Private Cathedral
Review: “I’m talking about those moments when you strip your gears, whether you’re chemically loaded or not, and get lost inside the immensity of creation and see too deeply into our ephemerality and our penchant for greed and war and willingness to destroy the Big Blue Marble, and for brief moment you scare yourself so badly you wonder why you didn’t park your porridge on the ceiling a long time ago.”
Are you kidding me? This sentence is form the first page of Burke’s latest in his iconic Dave Robicheaux series….in the second paragraph! Holy Cow. The Denver Post ha anointed Burke as “America’s best novelist”, and though I’m not ready jump on that with certainty, it’s certainly damn close. That said, Burke is not for everyone. You get lots of: these kinds of sentences that may require a dictionary, meandering searches for the meaning of life, ruminating on good and evil and aimless wandering around the historical subconscious of the Louisiana Bayou and the Deep South, in general. Robicheaux is a wonderful character, though by my count, he must be nearing 80 by now, while managing to maybe crack middle age in the stories. And his sidekick, Clete Purcell……. hard to describe, but one for the ages. These books get more mystical with time, and thus a little less believable, but his death defying stories are quite compelling and drag you into a world you probably have never even thought of. This is like visiting a very old friend for me.