Author's Comments

Cave Gossip is meant to be both a spiritual as well as comic novel. Instead of dealing with the women in his everyday life directly and forcefully, he responds as a child to the women in his life rather than as a man.

When he meets Helene, his life begins to change because the old strategies that he uses in dealing and relating with women no longer work. The conflict he experiences when he attempts to choose between his wife and Helene force him to move inward, he begins to understand that his life is filled with images just as the wall of the cave is covered with paintings and that these images possess meaning and by concentrating on them he begins to understand himself better.

The novel then is about soul building. As Karl confronts the problems and contradictions in his life he begins to understand the power of the images and through an understanding of the images he creates depth of soul. For instance, when he realizes that he has been chasing an internal image of the female and has failed to truly understand the women he has been living with, he can change his behavior and differentiate between Heike, Helene, and his mother. They are not the same and should not be responded to in the same way. Once he realizes that he can begin to deal with the conflicts he has with them in a more mature way.

 

KIRKUS REVIEW

"Amild-mannered scholar confronts his woman problems by delving into the mythic landscape of the south of France in this searching psychological novel.

Karl Wisent, a 30-ish German man living in Paris in the early 1990s, is writing a book about Nietzsche, but his life couldn’t be more un-Nietzschean. He’s thoroughly under the thumb of domineering women, from the censorious nuns at the Catholic girls’ school where he teaches to his estranged wife Heike, who lives in Berlin and has denied him sex for years. He finally takes—or rather is taken by—a mistress, Hélène, who is firmly in charge in bed and out. She makes it clear that he’s just a “contingent lover” for once-a-week trysts to relieve the tedium of routine sex with her live-in boyfriend. Weighed down by feelings of passivity and alienation, Karl retreats to a chateau in the countryside near Avignon, where he’s surrounded by symbols of an older, more authentic way of life. He takes in Stone Age cave paintings, communes with a peasant family and helps out with farm chores at a local monastery. He’s soon swarmed by a cosmopolitan group of semi-invited houseguests, including Heike and her new boyfriend, and finds himself the odd man out in their sexual roundelay. But he does participate fully in the party’s endless informal symposium, which ranges across such brow-furrowing topics as Greek, Egyptian, Icelandic and Hebrew mythology, the evolution of consciousness, the immortality of the soul and the sublimated cannibalism rite we call Christianity. As Karl applies all this lore to his anguished psyche, the book sometimes reads like a cross between Joseph Campbell and Freud. (One bevy of latter-day maenads advises Karl to project “the spirit of the bull” if he wants to satisfy a woman.) But Harvey writes with a subtle, evocative realism that keeps the ruminations grounded in the characters and their everyday travails.

An absorbing tale in which the quest for self-knowledge packs a lot of emotional resonance."