'A defrocked priest, Antony Elm, has made his way into a desert outside Alice Springs, where he intends to stay for forty days and forty nights. He is undergoing a crisis of faith and has brought with him the typescript for a book he has failed to finish about a meeting between Albert Einstein and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. This story concerns a crisis of understanding, as Bergson confronts Einstein about the meaning of time.
'On the back of his typescript Antony writes another story, somehow close to his heart, which concerns two young men traveling to Sydney from Canberra for the first time in the early 1980s. This story, about a crisis of love, takes place in a single night as the boys encounter temptation, damnation and salvation in the world of alternative music.
'Antony becomes increasingly delirious, observing temptations of the flesh and spirit, scribbling in the margins of his two unspooling narratives, awaiting a rescue that may or may not come.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Anthony Uhlmann has long been interested in the philosophical function of literature – not only its capacity to contain philosophical discussion, but the formal unfolding of the literary work itself as a philosophical act. St Antony in His Desert, Uhlmann’s first foray into fiction, is an unapologetically cerebral book, incorporating a key debate in the early twentieth-century clash between philosophy and physics. The tripartite structure of the novel is prefaced by an editor’s foreword, penned by one ‘Anthony Uhlmann’ of Western Sydney University, which is where the author teaches. He has been sent an unfinished typescript – an account of philosopher Henri Bergson’s historic encounter with Albert Einstein – on the verso of which an apparently fictional story is written. The author of these two narratives, we are told, is a priest named Antony Elm, whose brief interjections are also inscribed here and there on the palimpsestic text. The package has been sent to our editor by a nurse working at a hospital in the Northern Territory, to which the priest, perhaps defrocked or disgraced, was taken following his failed attempt at a monastic retreat into the desert. Of Elm the author, we know little more than this. From the opening pages of St Antony – as we parse the editor’s foreword and orient our reading to the multilayered text described – it is clear that the novel’s philosophical preoccupations will inhere as much in its form as in its content.' (Introduction)
'With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory. Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.' (Introduction)
'With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory. Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.' (Introduction)
'A critic once wrote of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that a close reading of the novel would yield, if nothing else, a recipe for raspberry jam. A similarly intimate engagement with Anthony Uhlmann’s ambitious fictional debut offers the potential for a kick-arse post-punk Spotify playlist, even if its experimental bent and high intellectual ambitions leave you otherwise nonplussed.' (Introduction)
'With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory. Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.' (Introduction)
'Anthony Uhlmann has long been interested in the philosophical function of literature – not only its capacity to contain philosophical discussion, but the formal unfolding of the literary work itself as a philosophical act. St Antony in His Desert, Uhlmann’s first foray into fiction, is an unapologetically cerebral book, incorporating a key debate in the early twentieth-century clash between philosophy and physics. The tripartite structure of the novel is prefaced by an editor’s foreword, penned by one ‘Anthony Uhlmann’ of Western Sydney University, which is where the author teaches. He has been sent an unfinished typescript – an account of philosopher Henri Bergson’s historic encounter with Albert Einstein – on the verso of which an apparently fictional story is written. The author of these two narratives, we are told, is a priest named Antony Elm, whose brief interjections are also inscribed here and there on the palimpsestic text. The package has been sent to our editor by a nurse working at a hospital in the Northern Territory, to which the priest, perhaps defrocked or disgraced, was taken following his failed attempt at a monastic retreat into the desert. Of Elm the author, we know little more than this. From the opening pages of St Antony – as we parse the editor’s foreword and orient our reading to the multilayered text described – it is clear that the novel’s philosophical preoccupations will inhere as much in its form as in its content.' (Introduction)
'A critic once wrote of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that a close reading of the novel would yield, if nothing else, a recipe for raspberry jam. A similarly intimate engagement with Anthony Uhlmann’s ambitious fictional debut offers the potential for a kick-arse post-punk Spotify playlist, even if its experimental bent and high intellectual ambitions leave you otherwise nonplussed.' (Introduction)
'With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory. Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.' (Introduction)
