There Are Doors [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The style, if not the content, is definitely influenced by Kafka - there are deliberate references thrown in and even a character unmistakably based on Kafka himself. This is far from a retread of "The Trial", however.

The protagonist is led on a surreal chase through another dimension in search of "the Goddess", who he has fallen in love with after a short tryst in his own dimension. This other world is strange, yet familiar: it runs a bit slower in time (the clock, one might say, has gone by now about 40 years slow), but the major difference is that here, for unexplained reasons, human males inevitably die after mating. This creates a (significantly) bee-like social structure with childbearing women (queens, if you will) in the positions of power; the men are for the most part skittishly subservient, but with a dangerous revolutionary undercurrent.

Most of the struggle in this book, however, is internal, as neither the reader nor the protagonist himself has a firm grasp on his own identity. What is his real name? Is he really an "alcoholic"? Is he mad? Is he, perhaps, a god?

A bit of knowledge about ancient myth will greatly expand the scope of your experience with this book - it is a good story regardless, but looking up some myths (if you don't know it already) will open up a whole new dimension to things. A knowledge of mythology and the world of myths itself will take you even further. Reading Campbell - or better yet, Robert Graves - is a great help in appreciating the artistic depth in much of Wolfe's work, and especially this book. Hopefully "There Are Doors" will encourage you to check these out, if you haven't already. But all this aside, this was a tremendous novel and I recommend it highly.

There Are Doors is a great novel; it's the kind of book that will have you slightly wistful and sad for days. My first thoughts upon waking, during several days in the week following my reading of this book, were of the images it evoked.

The plot is simple enough: a nebbishy nobody with psychological problems concludes that his girlfriend of brief duration is from some other place, and that certain gateways connect Here with There. There's the expected optical illusion of experience: are the protagonist's experiences really an interaction with a different external reality, or just an internal one? The plausible answer flips back and forth. Yet, where a overly clever and self-proud post-modernist novel would embrace this contradiction, and not resolve it, Wolfe does resolve it, although not simply, and not without a tour of the protagonists inner and outter life - which involves a world very similar and yet strikingly different than our own.

Don't expect standard science-fictional tropes, but be prepared for a lingering and haunting vision of deep love, loss, and yearning.