The Last Tower to Heaven
Days before his thirty-third birthday, Jacob Paul, an ordinary New Yorker, learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And, thus begins a 500-page, 18-years-long, Quixotic, often comic, picaresque. J's adventures lead him to Chase, his fellow traveler and love interest, and to Art, Chase's husband, the evangelical governor of Mexico, who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati, a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World, which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park, is obviously a failure, as, seemingly, are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy, until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. Last Tower to Heaven grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma, with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and, yet, messily alive in our world. Ultimately, that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love, for his love.Days before his thirty-third birthday, Jacob Paul, an ordinary New Yorker, learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And, thus begins a 500-page, 18-years-long, Quixotic, often comic, picaresque. J's adventures lead him to Chase, his fellow traveler and love interest, and to Art, Chase's husband, the evangelical governor of Mexico, who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati, a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World, which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park, is obviously a failure, as, seemingly, are all of J's attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy, until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. Last Tower to Heaven grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma, with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and, yet, messily alive in our world. Ultimately, that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love, for his love.
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"What is Last Tower to Heaven? A fantastical piece of meta-fiction? An audacious, even satiric revision of the holocaust novel? A philosophic or religious allegory? A sly take on the roman á clef? It is all of these things and more. Last Tower to Heaven doesn't move back and forth in time so much as explore how the past explodes into one's contemporary consciousness through the unearthed memories--or are they the writerly fantasies or remembrances?--of J: "Jacob Paul," the protagonist of Jacob Paul's newest experimental novel. Last Tower to Heaven asks us to consider when, and how, we can ever consider ourselves "separate" from the past. How can we be assured that, as writers and historians, we have represented history, and that history hasn't represented, and even invented, us? Who, or what, is "Jacob Paul," and how can we ever truly remove ourselves from the traumatic histories that inform our family narratives, our communal narratives, and our very identities?"
-Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale and Imaginary Vessels
"Paul has written a madcap, heartbreaking romp across a confused America. It's as though Charlie Kaufman and Philip Roth got together and said: 'Let's go nuts with this one"
-Joshua Mohr, author of Sirens
"Jacob Paul's new book Last Tower to Heaven embarks you on a journey to a new horizon and allows your imagination to run wild. The work is thrilling, humorous and filled with unexpected moments of great surprise. A delightful page-turner!"
-Shiva Ahmadi, artist.
"What if instead of your life being a tale told by an idiot it's the dream of a Jewish man in a van on his way to being gassed to death? Last Tower to Heaven is On the Road if it had been by Isaac Bashevis Singer instead of Kerouac. Part Moses wandering in the desert, part philosophical reflection, part contemporary existential despair, this is a book about what it means to be haunted by both the failures of one's present life and the weight of the collective past."
-Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife
