Nirvana
by Kevin Marley

Category: Fiction / Literary
340 pages; ISBN: 1-4116-2219-7

Rating: 9/10 (Ratings explained)
Reviewer: Tami Brady

Review

Nirvana is the physical, emotional, and spiritual journey of Ray Sawol. This book takes the reader into the life and the mind of Ray from the time of his conception through his childhood and adulthood to his death. During his lifetime, Ray works through the normal trials and triumphs of daily life: how to relate to others, how to pay the bills, how to find someone to love, how to raise a family, and generally how to follow the rules set out by our society. However, Ray also struggles with questions of who he is, what is his life purpose, and how does he connect with God and the world around him.

Nirvana masterfully illustrates the rollercoaster ride that we all call life. A piece of Ray is in all of us. Thus, the reader will immediately feel a profound connection to Ray. Using this strong character connection, this book brings to the surface all deep feelings of frustration, hope, failure, love, disconnection, and connection in the reader. Moreover, the author successful uses a number of very unique and creative literary devices such as the use of poetry-like pieces, newspaper headlines, and irregularly spaced texts mixed with regular text to subtly accentuate different moods and feelings in the story further drawing the reader into the depths of this book.

(Review can be read at the following URL: http://blether.com/blether.php?id=10551)

It “Smells like Teen Spirit”—the anthem of
the 90’s that made grunge mainstream. But
lo and behold it isn’t Kurt Cobain, Krist
Novoselic nor David Grohl. It’s Nirvana, a
340-page novel, bursting with creativity
filled with literary guitar riffs and banging
drums, and a very haunting voice by Seattle
writer, Kevin Marley.

Imagine that it’s the early 21st century,
not too hard to do, and that Mankind’s busy
with the discovery of the human genome,
nanotechnology, charged particle beam
warfare, and still the splitting of atoms, and
in general, opening Pandora’s Box—and
possibly, destroying itself. Our
technological prowess, for the most part, far
exceeds our collective wisdom and
compassion. But a Human Soul falls from
the skies with a remembrance of who he
truly is and where he is from, and as a result,
that changes everything.

In Nirvana, Ray Sawol is the quintessential
seeker and turns over with curious hands
and eager eyes rocks and stones, molecules
and atoms, vague theories and nebulous
paradigms, and String, and Unified Field
theories in physics in order to know the
truth.

Ray lives a so-called ordinary life as an
American, but he still vaguely remembers
the primordial bliss, the states of Heaven,
that his Human Soul once resided in, and
tries to change or expand his
consciousness so as to experience not just
the Newtonian or ordinary physical world,
but the quantum mechanical or spiritual
worlds that he is native to; and in many ways,
Nirvana is about a profound self-
transformation, a restructuring of human
consciousness, and a complete
reorientation to the world, as a result.

In a poignant chapter, Ray’s friend, Roger
Plunk, drives down The Proverbial Road of
Life and begins speeding up to well over 90
miles per hour far exceeding the
recommended curve speed of 40 m.p.h., and
as he states in the book:

"It's like driving a car down a road filled
with ruts," the madman once my trusted
friend continued. "Day after day, bored out
of our minds, we travel down the same
depressing road, Main St. U.S.A.
"Why?
"Because we're heavily conditioned
human beings--literally, stuck in a rut--who
fervently believe in the Illusion of Things
instead of The Marvelous Reality of Life ..."
"You're gonna kill us!"
"Stop the car!"
AAGH!!!!
"But what if as physics says," Roger
shouted above the mayhem, "there are
multiple realities right now, and we broke
not The Sonic Barrier but The Thought
Barrier, turning the steering wheel hand
over hand? What then?
"We'd go down A New Road, a road less
traveled!"
Eventually, Ray and his friends travel
down this road less traveled and Nirvana
harkens back to Jack Kerouac’s novel, On
the Road, as it mixes a Western life with
Eastern mysticism and the hope of a kind of
spiritual rebirth not just of the individual, but
of this nation, too.
Nirvana has received very compelling
book reviews and endorsements, and can
be found (and more importantly, bought) on
the Internet at www.Nirvanathebook.com. Jimmy Burns