Interview with Chris Katsaropoulos on ANTIPHONY by Wayne G. Boulton

The Right Key by Wayne G. Boulton

Interview with Chris Katsaropoulos, author of Antiphony

View the youtube video of the interview here.

“He knows.”

So ends Chris Katsaropoulos’s compelling second novel about the precipitous fall of Theodore Reveil – an eminent scientist whose lifelong pursuit of knowing and knowledge was tracking nicely with the Great Commandment (“You shall love the Lord your God…” Jesus said, “with all your mind”) before breaking out into the open in unprotected fashion and at exactly the wrong time.  In a meeting of his peers, Ted chooses to touch the ‘third rail’ of modern physics.

That would be God, or that would be referring to God, or that would be referring to God in a sentence that is not negative.

So the dramatic arc in Antiphony is clear from the outset.  It is the story of a descent.  But the fall of Theodore is only the springboard in this novel, not its heart.  Katsaropoulos – an accomplished writer and poet, and a long-standing member of 2^nd Presbyterian Church – has other fish to fry.  He wants to draw us in to the heart and mind and emotions (“the chest,” C. S. Lewis once called it) of a top-tier particle physicist at the summit of his career.

Without dumbing down, Katsaropoulos’s aim is a kind of inner physics, i.e., to get readers to see and feel the world as Ted sees and feels it.  There is no excluding, even for a moment, the herculean drive in and of Ted’s profession to explain the universe in toto.  What if – our author asks – we looked with Ted as he looks two directions at once?  What if the astounding modern discipline of particle physics gets better, not worse, when one looks deeply enough to sense its finitude, its human limits?  What if a second Einstein and the legendary ‘Theory of Everything’ isn’t in the discipline’s future?  Rather, what if simply contributing any and all of the profession’s insights to the waiting world [“the grand theatre of God’s glory” (Calvin)] turns out to be enough?

The main part of Antiphony, though, looks with Ted in the other direction, toward everyday life with the eyes of a physicist.  This is where the title comes in.  It so happens that I’ve always liked the word.  “Antiphony” refers to voices, verses, or songs sung in response to other songs, in answer to them, even in opposition (anti-) to previous voices.  At base, antiphony is a musical term.

Ted, it so happens, loves his music.  Here he is, having just lost his position in a physics research institute, walking alone, descending slowly into what has the aura at least of madness, stumbling upon and then into a church, entering the narthex and seeing a choir – 50 feet away – practicing.

“Theodore closes his eyes and lets the sound they [choir voices] emit wash over him.  The voices are filled with joy – two sets of voices it seems, the lower register singing a brief phrase followed by an answering phrase sung by the higher register.  He can feel the sound swelling up within him, the vibration bouncing off the walls and across the taut receptive surfaces of his body…he can feel the sound move back and forth across him, he feels it register in tottering delight in satisfying and shapely stronger confinement across him and through him…”

So, yes, readers with music in their heart will have an easier time with Antiphony.  The richness of this unusual novel, however, is that with Ted’s help, all are quickly introduced to an antiphonic ‘music of the spheres’ coming virtually from every direction in which the main character happens to turn.  Using a considerable native grasp of the scientific vocation and of the regular bloodletting that marks academic culture (“arguments turn vicious quickly among professors,” an old saying has it, “because the stakes are so low”), Ted meditates throughout on the dissonances and yet surprising harmonies that appear over and over again in the dyads of daily life – between male and female, success and failure, youth and age, dreaming and waking.  Are not the signals we keep getting from accelerators and telescopes, as well as from microscopes, similar…to wit, that our universe is indeed a unity, a uni-verse?

Then there are the grander, slipperier, and usually more difficult antiphonies: energy and velocity, time and what might be beyond time, chaos over against order over against chaos once again, science and religion, sanity in its perpetual war with madness.  Antiphony has them all; and in writing it, Katsaropoulos has given us a book in just the right key.

Wayne G. Boulton ~  M.Div. from McCormick Seminary, Ph.D. in Theological Studies from Duke University,former professor and department chair of religion at Hope College in Michigan, and president of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Author of From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics and the forthcoming Playing Favorites.

This article appeared in The Spire monthly magazine from Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, IN

Visit the Luminis webpage to order your copy or learn more about Antiphony.

“Unilateral” described as “inspiring” by The Examiner…

Read the entire review below and order your copy today- Unilateral

 

Unilateral by Chris Katsaropoulos

Unilateral was so good that after reading it, I immediately wanted to read Antiphony, Chris Katsaropoulos’s previous novel written in 2012. Read together they make a nice contrast in plot development, writing styles, and epiphany experiences. Antiphony is the story of a physicist whose attempts to explain his life’s work at a conference of his peers and insure his promotion to department head become sadly derailed. He loses his notes before his presentation, and spirals into a psychological abyss in which he either discovers the meaning of the universe, or loses his grip on reality, depending on the reader’s point of view. His responses to his life crises are compelling, and encourage pondering of relationships, religious experiences, and physics, especially its New Age interpretations. The book exhibits the author’s extensive knowledge of string theory, music, and the academic life. If you like an experimental style combined with metaphysical content, you will enjoy this book.
Unilateral was inspiring because of the character development, dialog, and descriptive use of setting to advance the story line. Theological implications are presented in a humanistic light, and the relationships are very true to life. Amel is a female Palestinian student and Ra’anan is a young Israeli bomber pilot whose destinies are intertwined in much the same way as the lives of the main characters in Antiphony but with a very different outcome. The story is convincing, and the treatment of the conflict in the Middle East is timely. The reader really cares about what happens to these two young people who face so many challenges in their lives in these war torn areas. It is a short book that holds your attention to the end. Read them both if you want to experience a double epiphany.
Reviewed by Sylvia Andrews- The Examiner

Spotted! ANTIPHONY~ front and center at the local Barnes & Noble…

Be sure to buy your copy today!  If your local bookstore hasn’t ordered them yet or they are out of stock, be a dear and ask them to replenish their shelves. Thanks!

You can also click here to order if you aren’t planning any trips into town~ Barnes and Noble and you’ll be taken straight to this incredible read!

ANTIPHONY Review ~ Eloquent and Brilliant ~ Five Stars

This review of ANTIPHONY by Chris Katsaropoulos completely captures the complexities and nuances of this exceptional novel. Grady Harp is an Amazon Top Ten Reviewer, poet and retired surgeon. We’ve posted an excerpt and link to the full review here, but also include the review in its entirety as it, too, is beautiful and eloquent.

“[An] epic poem cum novel, ANTIPHONY by the author Chris Katsaropoulos, [is] a book so eloquent and brilliant that it requires time – that precious entity few seem to have saved for exploration of the arts – to explore this obvious treasure. It is related to the great works of literature – James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Solzhenitsyn, Dante Alighieri, Roberto Bolaño, Tolstoy, Proust, Kazantzakis, Kafka, Melville, and Conrad. [Katsaropoulos’s] grasp of physics is astonishing as is his ability to phrase theory in a manner comfortably decipherable. His deep entrenchment in literature and in music blossoms on the pages frequently. His grasp of the manifold variations of human relationships breathes of psychology breeding with philosophy. But most of all it is the serene beauty of his writing that mesmerizes and results in starting the book again once finished that proves this is a man of letters who has an enormous gift and future.”

~ Grady Harp, Literary Aficionado, Amazon Top Ten Reviewer

Purchase Your copy at the Luminis Books website

Full Review

‘The book of revelations is a secondary symptom of a madman; only those who are insane can know beyond the solipsism of this world’
Occasionally a diamond so settled in the crust of the earth can go unnoticed, perhaps lacking the light it requires to send dazzling prisms to the eyes of the chaotic mass of shufflers preoccupied with the instant gratification of technologies competing with the air itself for push-button attention. Such is the case with this epic poem cum novel ANTIPHONY by the author Chris Katsaropoulos, a book so eloquent and brilliant that it requires time – that precious entity few seem to have saved for exploration of the arts – to explore this obvious treasure. It is related to the great works of literature – James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Solzhenitsyn, Dante Alighieri, Roberto Bolaño, Tolstoy, Proust, Kazantzakis, Kafka, Melville, and Conrad are a few that come to mind. It is presented in four chapters, best described as a quatrain. Written in 2011 it now comes to our attention in a new edition courtesy of Luminis Books, publishers of meaningful fiction, knowing that the book deserves wide attention.

Chris Katsaropoulos’ mind is so attuned to poetry, classical music, metaphysics, physics, science in general and man’s search for meaning that his book has portions, not unlike cadenzas in a piano concerto where the artist takes a pause from the orchestral score to expound on a note or phrase or thought that shows muscular and spiritual dexterity before returning to the work as a whole, that sing like few other authors can write. It is this gift that Katsaropoulos displays in this masterful work: while weaving a richly imaginative story he perseverates on a thought, relishing the character’s time and the reader’s indulgence to delve deeply into thoughts not usually found within the covers of a novel. His ability to sculpt words into topics as disparate as quantum physics to classical music to the poetry of the institutionalized poet Christopher Smart (1722- 1771) as set by Benjamin Britten in his antiphonal Rejoice in the Lamb to the cadences of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in performance to biblical tales and Greek mythology to the atmosphere of a Midwestern February churchyard silence or the suffocation of a California scientific gathering – his skill remains secure.

Quite briefly stated the story is the progress of Theodore Reviel, a String Theory physicist from a highly regarded Midwestern Institute, who has flown with his wife Ilene to California to present a much anticipated scientific paper on the Perturbation theory (Perturbation theory comprises mathematical methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related problem) that in the company of the String Theory should lead to the explanation of everything. Prior to his presentation he has a dream or a dreamlike state in which he envisions the coming apart of all scientific fact and all his thoughts are replaced by the possibility that his equations are unsolvable, that the universe is nothing more than a giant thought, that thought leading to the possibility that God is the meaning of everything. In a stupor he inputs his response on his cell phone email, awakens and is off to his presentation. But at this presentation he realizes he has lost his notes, irretrievable after attempts to recover them, and he faces his erudite audience of scientist and inadvertently shares `If the universe really is nothing more than a giant thought, a though projection emanating from some form of consciousness, and we are living within this projection, it would be impossible to discover the source of this projection by examining the projection itself in finer levels of detail…These unsolvable terms in our equations may be roadsigns pointing to consciousness – to God – as the missing piece of the puzzle.’ And his private email notes are broadcast to all scientists in attendance and at home in the Institute.

His audience is outraged, his boss Victor who has been grooming him to take over as head of the Institute department fires him, his best friend (and competitor for the position) Pradeep moves into first choice place, and Theodore leaves the Institute, afraid to tell his wife he is without a job, all of which sends Theodore out into the cold February night to seek solace with nature. He encounters a broken down church where the antiphonal strains of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb are being rehearsed, meets a former brief female acquaintance in a steeple, and begins to feel what life is like without the institute, without science, with only stream of consciousness thoughts that some may consider madness, others may consider entry into mysticism, others may hear the echoes of what life is really all about – the elusive Final Theory.

Chris Katsaropoulos wastes no words, even when he is streaming thoughts that at first feel dissociative or so far beyond the limits of the reader’s mind that they are impenetrable. His title tells us much: `antiphony’ – responsive alternation between two groups especially of singers – could represent the actual experience of hearing the Britten choral work in the old wreck of a church, the polar opposites of science and theology, the disparity between inner mind functioning our verbal communication of consciously filtered thoughts, and probably more variations on that theme. His grasp of physics is astonishing as is his ability to phrase theory in a manner comfortably decipherable. His deep entrenchment in literature and in music blossoms on the pages frequently. His grasp of the manifold variations of human relationships breathes of psychology breeding with philosophy. But most of all it is the serene beauty of his writing that mesmerizes and results in starting the book again once finished that proves this is a man of letters who has an enormous gift and future.

Amazon Top Ten Reviewer gives ANTIPHONY Four Stars!

“With the debate between supporters of evolution and creationism (recently highlighted by Bill Nye and Ken Ham), Antiphony is an intriguing timely tale. As readers observe the protagonist’s everyday life, we wonder whether Reveil’s revelation means he is losing his mind or finding a spiritual awakening that will ultimately lead him to the asylum or the Universe’s Final Unified Field Theory. Fans who prefer something offbeat will appreciate Chris Katsaropoulos’ profound character study of a physicist on the brink of discovery, insanity or both.” ~ Harriet Klausner, Amazon Top Ten Reviewer

Click here for the full review and to purchase ANTIPHONY.

Luminis Spring literary fiction ~ Ghosts of Tom Joad and Antiphony

A story about growth, failure, and redemption, Ghosts of Tom Joad traces the rise of the working poor and the don’t-have-to-work-rich as it follows the fortunes of the protagonist Earl. Anyone interested in the impact of political and business policy on the American Dream will be drawn to this profound, humorous, and moving novel.

“Politicians come and go, but the critical issues tearing at our society do not. In his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad, Van Buren turns to the larger themes of social justice and equality, and asks uncomfortable questions about where we are headed.” ~ Daniel Elisberg, whistleblower, The Pentagon Papers

“A lyrical, and deeply reported look at America’s decline from the bottom up. Though a work of fiction, Ghosts of Tom Joad is – sadly, and importantly – based on absolute fact. Buy it, read it, think about it.” ~ Janet Reitman, contributing editor, Rolling Stone, author of Inside Scientology: the Story of American’s Most Secretive Religion

Peter Van Buren , a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. His first book,  We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Metropolitan Books, 2011, received critical acclaim.

Learn more at the Luminis Books website.

Theodore Reveil is one of the leading lights in String Theory physics, on his way to present his latest research at a triumphant meeting of his colleagues from around the world, when he realizes he has lost the notes for his presentation.
At the podium, in the midst of his distraction and confusion, he poses the question: “What if the universe is really a giant thought?”

Antiphony traces the downward spiral of Theodore’s career in the wake of what he has said, and the remarkable transformation that leads him into the depths of madness . . . or the revelation of the Final Theory, the ultimate secret of the universe.

“Hold on to your chair or you will be totally transported out of your comfort zone by local author Chris Katsaropoulos’ new novel. “Antiphony” (Luminis Books) does what is title intends — it ensnares you with “alternative or responsive ideas or opinions.” The lyrical writing in “Antiphony” deftly dances between Reveil’s meandering thoughts and the world in which he is moving about. It starts with Reveil wondering: “What if the universe is really a giant thought?” It ends with a shocking revelation about one human in the pursuit of one truth. Katsaropoulos is an emerging fresh literary voice not to be overlooked.” ~ Rita Kohn, NUVO Magazine

 “Katsaropoulos raises many intriguing questions that offer metaphysical food for the mind. The ultimate questions “Antiphony” poses for the reader are: What if Theodore is mad? What if, indeed, we are all? Read the book! The story is fascinating and the writing is powerful and poetic.” ~ Joseph Yurt for Reader Views and in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Chris Katsaropoulos is the author of more than a dozen titles, including two novels, Fragile and Antiphony. He has traveled extensively in Europe and North America, and enjoys collecting books and music. His first collection of poetry Complex Knowing is due out in Fall, 2014.

Learn more at the Luminis Books website.

Luminis Books at ALA Chicago 2013!

Authors Laurie Gray, Chris Katsaropoulos and Tracy Richardson were at the American Library Association conference in Chicago recently signing books! We gave away lots of free books to librarians because they are the Champions of Reading! Being at ALA is such fun because it is ALL ABOUT BOOKS and people who love them as much as we do.

Chris Katsaropoulos signing his novel Antiphony

People were very intrigued with the idea “What if the Universe is a giant thought?” ~String Theory physics and consciousness in a novel. Katsaropoulos does it all with beautifully written prose.

 

 

Laurie Gray signing copies of Maybe I Will

Maybe I Will is getting a lot of Top Ten recommendations from the Young Adult Library Services (YALSA) galley reviewers!

 

 

 

Tracy Richardson signing ARC’s of  The Field

Is Eric’s almost supernatural skill in the goal due to athletic ability or something much, much more?