As the publisher writes: Euchrid, a crippled boy from a religious community, is rejected by his loved ones. His otherness does not fit into the narrow framework of the provincial world, which means that he has to face the challenges that life poses to him alone.
Nick Cave creates a visionary universe full of symbols and original metaphors. His poetic story pulls you in from the first page. “When the donkey saw the angel” is an extremely original work not only for fans of the Australian music. First published in 1989, it now appears in a refreshed translation by Jerzy Łoziński.
Nick Cave’s novel “When the Ass Saw the Angel” – excerpt:
I remember sitting on the porch steps when I was seven years old, looking across the cane fields where the Maine Road scythes through them, where the first of the trucks loaded with materials from Vargustone rolled through clouds of red dust; and as I watched, I also listened and heard the driver downshift and then upshift again as he turned onto the road – now called the Glory Trail – which heads east from Maine directly across from the almost unused path going west along the northwest edge of the fields and about a hundred yards past the front porch of my shack. I wonder what they’ll call it, my lane, now that it’s gotten so loud.
I watch trucks scramble up the slope now called Glory Hill, the Hill of Glory, to its flat top. And my hill? What shall my hill be called?
“These trucks, they’re not from here, they’re not. They’re hauling wood from some big place. Vargustone, my understanding. Yes and all the rest, workers, architects, everything. That’s how it has to be.”
He must have been thinking something like that, sitting on the steps, and it was summer and 1940. f “A few words about Euchrid’s ancestors. His father, Ezra, had been born in 1890 in the lush Black Morton Range, in a famous but mostly unmapped region of densely vegetated basins and hills. At their foot, the beds of dried-up streams gape, the slopes are overgrown with thick bushes, which above pass into tall trees and tangled briars.
On the eastern border runs a dangerous, sandy road, which at the turn of the century became infamous due to the mysterious disappearance of over twenty travelers who wanted to cross the range in search of the fortune that was supposed to await them in the east.
An investigation into Black Range travelers (“Morton” did not appear in the official name until 1902) cast suspicion on a soon tracked down one named Toad Morton, whom journalists dubbed Black Morton, Black Morton. Toad, a dim-witted pig farmer, was kicked out of his home by his own family after they found a dead, fly-covered hog in the pigsty, with visible traces of human teeth where its hind leg had been bitten off. When they saw Toad, covered in pig shit, sucking a knuckle, they chased him out of his valley, and he, a Goliath stricken and renounced by his own blood, roamed the ravines and ravines without friends or company except for a herd of demons, that kicked and itched in the cavities and dark crevices of his evil, mad and vile mind.
Toad holed up on the side of this treacherous eastern road and eagerly ambushed lone riders fit to satisfy his infernal tastes.
When found in a small cave off the road, he was wearing nothing but boots that were far too big and a cloud of flies, fattened on human scraps from long-gone meals. He crouched in the slit belly of the still-warm girl and, munching, ate the face of her wretched headless father, suspended a foot above the ground, for he had been impaled on a pointed stake.
Looking down at the group of trackers darkening in the cave’s bright entrance, the hulking, lonely Toad called out, pointing to the corpses, “Brothers, so you found me! We’re going home! Sit down, there’s plenty of food!” Two hot tears ran down his cheeks and he smiled warmly at them, showing his sharply filed teeth.
The trackers that set out from Salem were led by Deputy Sheriff Cogburne. It was Cogburne who shot Toad Morton on the spot like a dog.
On the road that runs along the eastern edge of the Black Morton Range there is a large stone tablet on which is written in white paint:
ATTENTION! MORTON MURDER SITE!
Weary wanderer, hold your horse here,
To think for a moment about the human monster,
Fortunately, it will never happen here again
None of Morton’s fornication.
Toad Morton was the eldest of fifteen children. After him was Luther, then Er. After the Era came the turn of Nun, named after his father, and Gad was born in that year. He was immediately followed by Ezra, after which three girls appeared in the family: Lee, Mary Lee and Mary. Next, Ezekiel. Blind Dan. Little Fan who died at the age of three and a half. Angel, who had three children of her own when she was fourteen. And finally Batho and Ben, who was also quickly taken from this world, consumed by some unidentified hereditary disease, to which he finally succumbed as a two-year-old.
So Euchrid’s father, Ezra, was the sixth in what seemed to be an endless stream of whimpering, snotty offspring. He changed his name from Morton to Eucrow in 1925 when he managed to elude one of the hit men who terrorized the area in Sheriff Cogburne’s infamous clean-up operation. As a young boy, Ezra began to suffer under the burden of his relatives’ fornication. The family tree was as tangled as the heather growing over the tormented hills. Blinding headaches, catatonia, spasms, trances, sudden outbursts of uncontrollable rage were the order of the day. Whether or not this was a consequence of the incestuous relationships of his ancestors, he had no idea.
The question of inheritance greatly vexed God-fearing Ezra, who could quote extensive passages of Scripture from memory. The Bible was the only book his mother would accept in the house, and Ezra was the only one of her many siblings she had been able to teach her to read. Even if Ezra carried a burden of bad blood, the burden lay hidden somewhere deeper.
For young Ezra did not have all the treacherous traits that his siblings did not spare: dullness of face, clumsy speech, sluggish gait. He could not be called repulsive, and his appearance was in no way affected by the vice of his ancestors. He had a strong back, straight legs, and bushy hair. The teeth, though too large and too numerous, were strong, and the eyes, blue eyes, a little faded, a little wild, did not break the harmony of the face despite fits of rage and sudden trances. He wasn’t squinting like Gad, or blind like Dan, or cross-eyed like crazy Angel.
When the donkey saw the angel Art Rage promotional materials
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
