Gustave Termi is sitting on the toilet in Geneva one day when the Archangel Michael calls him to become one of the elect. No one could be more bewildered by this call than the agnostic Gustave. An encounter with a journalist in a therapist’s waiting room, however, leads this bumbling middle-aged professor to read of the similarly inexplicable mystical calling of Stefanie von Rothenberg, a cultured Austrian whose relationship with the daemonic is only a little less strange than her relationship with Adolf Hitler. The Adorations is a novel about Europe’s true holy trinity—politics, faith, and insanity—narrated with effortless erudition by Roger Boylan, whose Nabokovian knack for sentence-making knows no equal.
