I thoroughly enjoyed reading your novel: it took me a week's evenings and I even cheated a few mornings because I got curious about how a particular story-line was going.

This is not an easy book to read, but the (over)abundance of folklore plots keeps coming and the different embedded narratives never run out: as soon as one is winding up, another has begun to weave its way and the reader (the real reader: me) just keeps going. The triple quest is sufficiently present throughout to keep the reader interested and the winding up is much more spectacular than this reader (me, again) had ever expected.

Congratulations and thanks for a very enjoyable read!

Geert Lernout, professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Reading Raphael Slepon's first novel is like following Alice down the rabbit hole into a distorted world made familiar through stylized prose, comic through word play, disorienting through intertwining mysteries, challenging through puzzles, frightening through the real-world parallels, and ultimately satisfying in its representation of life seen thorough the mirror of the folk tale. The plot consists of two back stories, one set just before World War I when a woman takes on a mysterious mission in memory of her illiterate lover, the second a tale of three siblings pursuing three paths in life, each determined to find a way to save the lives of their parents. The central plot that follows the three sibs and underlies and controls the two back stories consists of the deft intertwining of well over a hundred different folktales given new life through Slepon's amazing, amusing, and even grotesque variations. Though each tale is unique, charming or horrid or fascinating in and of itself, each also contributes to our increasing curiosity about the work as a whole.

The meaning of the work emerges from its central plot and like any good novel manages to express the universal through the particular. In this case, the universal is the role of story in our lives, its ability to reassure through ritual from the moment we can listen to the moment we no longer can see or hear. A description of the "brief letter" her mother adds to the basket Catherine (representing a variation of Little Red) carries to her grandmother, illustrates Slepon's gentle wit: "her mother had laboured over it for almost an hour, writing no more than one or two words every minute or so, perhaps as many as three if one was very simple, like a or the or and, for her grandmother was a very slow reader indeed and could not read any faster." But he is equally at home in the tradition of grisly horror, as seen in this adventure that befalls our Catherine, who enters an "unexpectedly cool, if not cold" room where, "almost twice her height and covering much of the floor," rose "a huge stack of bodies and body parts," "[b]are flesh, gaping faces, dismembered limbs, beheaded torsos, hands, feet, hearts, livers, men, women, naked, dressed, all steeped in gore, seeping into a large pool of coagulating blood."

In thirteen chapters plus a prologue, Slepon reanimates the fairy tale for the adult reader, first by stitching together a plurality of possibilities contained within the folklore tradition, second by introducing the reader and writer as post modern actors within this tradition, and finally by breathing anew into character and tale the absurdly persistent comic spirit of mankind. Although he generally eschews direct allusion to literary sources other than the folk tale in this work, Slepon reflects Joyce's fondness for the power of syntax, word play, and lists. Readers who appreciate these stylistic features will bask in the glow of that light.

Sandy Tropp, wife, mother, widow, grandmother, reader, and assistant professor (retired), Department of English, Boston University, USA

In an enchanted world, two siblings set out on a journey to save their parents, while a third stays home to act as nurse. Endowed with magical powers, the three embark on an unforeseeable adventure. Alfred, with the help of a ring, has the gift of shape-shifting. Tanya has a keen sense of hearing that enables her to communicate with animals. Catherine, the gifted seamstress, can sew anything with her needle, especially stories. But the true seamstress of this novel is its talented writer, Raphael Slepon. Raphael skillfully sews together an epic novel that surpasses a reader's expectations. Carefully and thoughtfully, Raphael tells a touching story, the story of stories. His intricate work of tying together multiple folktales in the most gentle and natural way reminds the reader of what a story ought to be. While reading this novel the reader travels to a land where senses are heightened, blessings and curses live harmoniously and the impossible is possible. This sensitive novel is a pleasure to read. Truly a blessing of a novel.

Naomi Sullum, high-school teacher, Israel

Contained within "An Ovel" are fairy tales, folklore and droll stories (retold or reworked), and a warmth toward the natural world displayed in numerous animal characters who work in concert with humans. At the same time, there is wordplay both subtle & blatant, an elaborate formal system built around numbers, self-referential irony toward the act of writing a novel and the whole enterprise of reading, and a literary puzzle in the form of a manuscript produced by an illiterate printer's apprentice. Throughout, there are snippets from this text written in a language that, while not yet comprehensible to me, is coherent. It resembles English both in syntax and phonology, and appears to use its mysterious vocabulary consistently.

After two readings, I am dimly able to see the book's resonances and correspondences. I find the book rich, provocative and challenging – enough so to stick with until I figure out how the fairytale simplicity and postmodern humor tie together, and what is the secret of that darn manuscript.

What are the rewards of "An Ovel"? First, humor and surprise are plentiful. Second, the earthy side of human experience is depicted, but in an over-the-top manner. There are gruesome deaths and horrible daydreams. The protagonists consist of a woman predisposed to emptying her bladder, her lusty & selfish brother, and a neurotic sister who consorts with a robber bridegroom whom she is passionate about though he seeks to enslave or kill her. Finally, the work is allusive & sophisticated. It calls for the sorts of puzzle-solving and attentiveness that characterize the most rewarding reading.

I hope to continue my reading of "An Ovel" until it becomes an oval, in which there are no rough edges and everything is connected.

Joel Reisman, computer programmer/analyst and James Joyce enthusiast, USA

If Actor = Storyteller, Good Acting = Good Narrating, by Alec Battles

'Shakespeare' may be thought of as a vast collection of games. Games in which the oldest and most enduring stories [...] are made new. Games in which public is pitched against private, young against old, female against male, inheritance against environment; [...] games which are resolved by games within the game. [...] Among Shakespeare's most original and distinctive plays [...] contain plays within plays and dissolutions of the distinction between reality, performance, and dream. [...] Shakespeare's games [have] the capacity to be played successfully in an almost infinite number of different cultural circumstances [...] he has a Shakespearean myriad-mindedness [...] wily in his aspectuality. — Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare

At first glance, it looks like a postmodern folktale several hundred pages in length...

I thought of titling this review "Apuleius, Rabelais, Joyce, Slepon" (to the same music as Beckett titled his essay on Finnegans Wake when that book was still known as Work in Progress) but decided to keep it simple. "The Apple and The Worm" was my second choice of title, because that's what my journey into An Ovel felt like. I decided to focus on the connection between performance and storytelling, however.

Beckett's title of his famous essay about draft versions of Finnegans Wake never proved true for me, anyway. I searched everywhere in Dante and Vico, and found very few holes in the pages bearing the Joyce's distinctive teethmarks.

As for An Ovel, its Joycean (Wakean) inheritance is visibly important, and was my jumping-off point as a reader. When we learn the book's five main characters, I believe we are hearing echoes of Finnegans Wake's primordial five.

But when I first read that Slepon was asking people to beta test his novel, I jumped at the chance, then shrinked back.

I am averse to reading novels. Feynman once told a fellow intellectual, I do not know whom, that he'd read too many to make any serious discoveries, and I think Feynman – who taught himself to crack a safe and deciphered astronomical tables of the Dresden Codex from scratch – was right in having more fun with these things than with novels.

But An Ovel's title is deceptive. It is highly challenging fare. While the lack of dialogue may seem like an oversight to some, it's evident that the writer was well aware of that difficulty.

An Ovel does not follow its own rules, not entirely: the rules so happen to resemble the recursive fairy-tales we all know were common to the ancient middle east, and that's why I like it.

Mandelbrot set-like, An Ovel is the kind of thing songbirds would write if they wrote English: it's beautiful because it's recursive.

The beauty of An Ovel led me to believe that there was not so much difference between a fairy tale and a modern narrative as I had previously thought.

And it taught me that modern narratives are by far inferior. The fairy tale, being more ornate, is also more differentiated than a modern narrative.

An Ovel may be your kind of book if the virtuosic use of imagination is important to you. An Ovel may also be for anyone who liked the movie The Princess Bride. Or for anyone who liked Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, or other similar works.

Someone once said that the best layman's book of programming was Carroll's Alice. An Ovel may someday be just as well regarded by computer scientists. It is certainly just as good.

Alec Battles, husband, stepfather, geek, Herts., UK

Two stars (didn't like).

It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to review a novel that one doesn't comprehend, for the fault may lie not in the skill of the author, but in the wit of the reviewer. Compelled to judge without understanding, one can only rely on the subjective experience: was the novel a "good read"? An Ovel, by Raphael Slepon, failed to satisfy this reader on this most fundamental level.

The novel itself is structured in the literary form called by J.R.R. Tolkien a "braid": a structure common among medieval romances, Spencer's A Faerie Queen, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. That is, there are spawned multiple narrative strands, each focused on one or a band of characters which may, from time to time, come back together and then part again, perhaps in new combinations. Slepon complicates this basic structure by making extensive use of backstories, either related by one of the characters or simply introduced into the narrative flow without transition.

There are two major strands of the novel which are independent from the first, never explicitly brought together, and related to each other only by the occurrence of common motifs: a triangular chest of drawers, a shiny penny, a sewing kit, and others.

The first strand of narration begins with the Introduction, and continues on as the first few paragraphs of each of the thirteen main sections of the novel. Although beginning with the formulaic "Once upon a time", it is largely realistic and modern in tone. This narration concerns the creation and partial destruction of a mysterious manuscript on the Isle of Man in the years 1912-1913, the rescue of its beginning paragraphs by a young woman, and its division by her into thirteen (or perhaps twelve) parts. Each of the thirteen sections of the novel begins with a few paragraphs devoted to a description of her disposition of one of these scraps as she travels the world. Included in each section is the appropriate excerpt from the manuscript. Here is a short sample, drawn at random:

"Ice, was beginning was so tit to bigern, was might, be its sor emne rigor ifrore, cele a maman mass, ... "

This is not so much gibberish as first appears: most of the words appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (often as early modern spelling variants or extremely obscure, obsolete words in one dialect or another); obsolete senses of recognizable words are also in supply. A tentative "translation" of the snippet above with the aid of the OED and some downright guessing, is:

"Ice, whose beginning was so (tight?) to snare, whose might, by its (sore?) even rigidity y-frozen, chill a mother's mass, ... "

This material must have been hard to put together: it is considerable drudgery to try to unravel it, not to mention the need to have access to the OED (and younger eyes than mine to read it). Yet I am convinced there is sense to be decoded here, for those with the time and inclination.

The second strand of narration concerns the life of three siblings: Catherine, Alfred, and Tanya, their quest to retrieve the "Waters of Life" in order to revive their comatose parents, and its conclusion. Along the way they separate (spawning three strands of the braid), adventure individually, encounter many characters, most of whom have their own backstories, reunite, and conclude their quest. All of these strands are written in the style of folktale (fables, fairy tales, children's stories, legends, romances, myths and so on); and these intertwined and labyrinthine narratives form the main body of the novel.

Given this structure, one would hope to encounter a book which could be read quite literally, setting aside any esoteric structure and enjoying the folk stories simply as folk stories: retold, refashioned, created anew: taking its place alongside Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Hausmarchen, or Tolstoy's Razkaziy. It is at this level that the book fails to work for me, and without the underpinning of charm or entertainment, I find it difficult to work up any enthusiasm for attacking the more esoteric mysteries implicit in the novel.

Oddly, Slepon himself is well aware of the difficulties: on page 118 we encounter the reader of a novel, who is "fed up" with the task she is pursuing. The following reasons are listed: they are all true of An Ovel, and this is clearly a self-referential passage (there are others). As this list includes and extends those criticisms I had jotted down by the time I got this far, I will paraphrase and comment on them here.

First: "The author's highly-repetitive, highly-affected style". (The word I had chosen was "manneristic"). Folk tales (and epics, which are extended folk tales) are noted for repetition, odd turns of phrase, and the use of obsolete or antiquarian idioms and words. In extended narrative, what is charming and rustic becomes increasingly abrasive and annoying, particularly if there is little variation in pace or register from story to story.

Second: nameless, one-dimensional characters. This effect is a consequence of the extreme plot density and rapid-fire pace of events, leaving little space for conversation among the characters or contemplation by any one of them. And the characters are, indeed, nameless (except for the main three), challenging the reader's memory. (Sorting through the various kings, queens, princes and princesses is a job of work.) The overall effect is rather like trying to read a long Russian novel with all of the names crossed out.

Third: No dialogue. Again, this is literally true: I was unable to find a single line of direct dialogue in the entire novel. That is not to say there is no speaking: but everything is reported indirectly, summarized and digested by the narrator-author. Here there is no justification, for a good part of the fun (for story-teller and listener alike) in many folk tales are the storyteller's imitation of the various characters in dialogue. Can you imagine "The Three Little Pigs" without "I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blo-o-o-o-w your house down!"

Fourth: Failure "to anchor the story in one readily recognisable historical period". I personally was not terribly bothered by this. What bothered me the most was the occasional use of modern slang/diction in the folk tale setting, which for me interrupts the "willing suspension of disbelief".

Fifth: Extension of "sentences into entirely unmanageable lengths". We are not talking Faulkner or Joyce here, but still ... (Epic catalogues are not a great favorite of mine.)

The one characteristic I would add to this list of faults is that of relentless pacing: the novel has too much plot, too little characterization, too little description of locale. We almost never learn about what the many characters are thinking about, nor do they talk to each other very much.

Finally, the unnamed reader has a question: "whether the following chapters would unfold a sensible solution to the novel's so-called mysteries and culminate in a rewarding and conclusive ending". While each reader must render an individual judgement, mine is that they do not.

When I finished the first reading An Ovel, I found myself thinking of the novel and its "solution" on the following three levels.

The first involves the manifest plot of the main strand (that relating to Catherine, Alfred, and Tanya): how does the quest to find the waters of life end? Is it successful or unsuccessful? What happens to the three characters, their family, and their companions? These questions are indeed manifestly answered. One expects a rough balance between the magnitude of the effort (by both the protagonists and the reader), the climax, and the denouement. A big story should have an exciting climax and a meaningful denouement. Yet the manifest climax and denouement seem desultory, even silly. So, considered as a traditional novel, although I found it amusing in parts, I was disappointed at the end, feeling that the work performed in traversing the narrative was not matched by a reasonably healthy payoff for the reader.

We come now to the strand begun in the Introduction, concerning the mysterious manuscript portioned and distributed by the anonymous young lady who is the protagonist. This strand is written in a realistic, modern register, though also devoid of dialogue or characterization. The motivations of the protagonist for her actions are concealed throughout, nor do we learn what they are at the end. The climax is sufficiently weighty. The denouement is a puzzle, or series of puzzles, implicit in information now revealed concerning the protagonist and her attitudes towards the previous events in her life. One puzzle in particular is what is commonly known as a "logic puzzle" and can presumably be solved by well-known means (I have not done so.) Ostensibly, the reader is challenged to find answers to the questions implied by the newly revealed information -- and implicitly, to come to understand the protagonist's ultimate purpose in distributing the manuscript parts, and what (presumed) meaning might be implicit in the manuscript itself.

It seems apparent that the questions posed in the modernistic strand can only be completely answered by consulting the the folk tale strand, and by understanding the relationship between the manuscript, the two main strands of narrative, and An Ovel itself. Other than noting that the manuscript and An Ovel are probably intended, at some level of abstraction, to be identified with each other, and the obvious (and perhaps superficial) observation that "An Ovel" can be written "A nOvel" by relocating the space, I don't understand any of the intended deep relationships among the parts. One might hope that if this understanding could be reached, the "defects" of the second strand would be explained and seen to be perfections, not flaws at all.

It is difficult for me to see how this work will find an initial audience with enthusiasm enough to work through the deeper problems posed, especially as a first novel. Some means must be found to turn this Silmarilion into The Hobbit.

William Shockley, retired US Navy software engineer, USA