Alina in Ecstasy

About the Book

Alina in Ecstasy is a novel about a man who is a famous writer and intensely hostile to religion. Julian Mandel, more an agnostic than an atheist, is in a rage over a former lover's decision to join the Carthusians—a religious order noted for silence and solitude. When he visits Alina, now Mother Maddalena, she claims not to recognize either Julian or herself as the persons involved in a former sexual relationship. Later, he learns she has died and been declared “blessed” by the pope. Obsessed by this development, he tries to prevent her advancement to sainthood. But when Julian is cured of terminal cancer, which the Vatican believes is a second miracle owed to Alina's intervention, he prays for the return of his cancer. When it does, he cannot avoid the thought that Alina has intervened to subvert her own canonization. The Vatican quickly responds by declaring that no protocol exists for treating as miraculous the reversal of a former miracle. This novel is meant to be spiritual reading cast as a psychological thriller: to inform a secular audience, against all odds, that love is stronger than death. The effort has succeeded if it fuses the erotic with the mystical like Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa now viewed through the medium of fiction. Alina in Ecstasy is intent on its goal: to tell how a saint is made. Miracles are the hook.

About the Author

A native New Yorker, Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkok and Chicago. For over ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University´s Bronx and Lincoln Center Campuses. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism at Columbia University in New York City and Franklin University in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in graduate school mentoring, he is also a fiction writer. He has published five novels: Fire in a Windless Place, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil´s Interval, and The Odor of Sanctity. Two novellas, The Powers That Be and and Beyond the Pale appeared in print as Double Entendre. There followed three books of short stories: Outwards Signs, The Mansions of Limbo, and Triple Sec; then a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were. He has guided students in journalism and international studies at The New School for Social Research, and has contributed essays to the New School's newspaper in his online column, A Word to the Wise.