Kenneth Kuenster – författare

The Annunciationist is the story of an American painter obsessed with the meaning and significance of paintings of the Annunciation. It is the intensity of the relationship between Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin, and the message conveyed, “You have in your womb an infant” that so fascinates Martin, our painter. He believes that Gabriel is somehow involved because before his announcement, the Virgin was a virgin. It is forbidden intimacy with the Virgin that so intrigues Martin because it had been what he had faced in his own life. The women he had been drawn to were women he believed were forbidden, and whenever consummation did seem to be a possibility, his sense of taboo stymied it.With this obsession, Martin sets off to view Annunciation paintings in Europe. In the process, he finds models for his own paintings, which he makes in the course of his repeated returns to the Greek island of Santorini, which is his base in the villa of his friend Orlando Pettingill.His travels take him to Assisi, Italy, where he has a relationship with a fallen-away nun, and a son is born as a result. Later he goes to an Eastern Orthodox Romanian monastery where he connects platonically with a young nun whose mother was murdered by Nicolae Ceau?escu, Romania’s dictator. The nun becomes a participant in a painting of his. He connects with an American flutist, whose mother was a model for the sculptor Constantin Brâncu?i, and another child is born, and another Annunciation painting results.Eventually, Martin finishes three Annunciation paintings peopled by his models from his travels and his obsession. They are installed in a beautiful white stone gallery Orlando has built for them. There, his work looks out over the Aegean Sea, long after his own unexpected demise.

God’s Kettledrum is an adventure into the world of avant-garde theater performance, and the lives of its players. The narrator is the director of the theater group. Two of the main characters are identical red head twin sisters Ada and Blain. Ada is a dancer with impressive skills and feisty attitude. Blain has been kidnapped from her school in Switzerland and the narrator is assigned the role of negotiating her release by the girl’s step-father and financial supporter of the dance company. Blain is being held in Rome and Ada is to accompany the narrator at the insistence of Lucrezia, a theater producer, who is involved in the holding of Blain. She is a midget, beautiful, and very accomplished, and a tough negotiator. She wants to co-produce a theater piece with the narrator for inclusion in The Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto which has always been denied to her. The mother of the twins is introduced and has a light X scar across her face done by a forger of early painting, out of jealousy. The forger is the father of the twins. The forger locates the twins and arranges to have them model for him in a forged Lippi painting. In the process he makes sexual moves on Ada, and when she rejects him, he attempts to scar her with a cut across her face but Blain kills him with a blow to the head — one of many interactions between the varied characters in the course of the book.