Crepuscule W/Nellie: a novel (#RECURRENT, #1)

4.7/5 ( ratings)

A work of speculative historical fiction that depicts the lives of Thelonious Monk and his wife, Nellie, Joe Milazzo’s Crepuscule W/ Nellie does not attempt historical accuracy. Neither is it an ekphrastic experiment meant to mimic Monk’s brilliance, with his signature dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists. Instead, much like Monk’s composing, Crepuscule W/ Nellie creates a whole new architecture in which to tell its story.

Steve Erickson on Joe Milazzo:
“The challenge in writing on behalf of Joe Milazzo’s fiction is finding the language to convey how special it is, but let us begin with audacious and fearless, lyrical and brilliant, superbly imaginative and assuredly accomplished—one of tomorrow’s great novelists on the cusp of his moment.”

Claire Donato on Crepuscule W/ Nellie:
“A polyvocal narrative that’s part Faulkner à la midcentury Manhattan’s jazz epicenters, part early 90’s avant-pop crossed with Black Mountain poetics, and part ghost, Joe Milazzo’s genrebending Crepuscule W/ Nellie boldly re-imagines the relationship between fact and fiction.”

Douglas Kearney on Crepuscule W/ Nellie:
“Milazzo dug this lost recording of the Monk/Monk/Pannonica trio—dug as in figured, as in got into, as in exhumed—out that ‘dustbin’ folks talk about. And since the composition called Crepuscule w/Nellie is this time a story storying history, the good mess Milazzo so expertly messes with alchemizes the linguistic odds-and-ends that make a vernacular both high-falluting and low-down; the factual scraps that member a fiction into a rich speculation; and the individuals ignored so long they must come back to us in books. Our author has given us a fascinating one. Dig it, dig it, dig it.”

Sesshu Foster on Crepuscule W/ Nellie:
“Joe Milazzo’s Crepuscule w/Nellie is a blast. So rarely do we get a novel this momentous, challenging, ambitious—Crepuscule w/ Nellie transcends expectation. I’m moved by the fierce acuity of the maximalist prose, never less than adroit and vital as it parses a famous triangle between the maestro, Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and the Bebop Baroness, Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the most storied music patron of the 20th century. Triangulating the infinite personal declensions between struggling black musicians and the white patrons, between the women and their men, Joe Milazzo’s language brilliantly echolocates that essentially American distance, sounding out an American loneliness that is with us still.”

Joseph McElroy on Crepuscule W/ Nellie:
“Joe Milazzo’s Crepuscule W/ Nellie takes as its great and original subject a care-giver’s, literally home-maker’s immensely improvising relation to a creative genius, a demanding, needy, powerful, enigmatic, often disappointing man who was her husband. That is what this long, intimate, painfully American, many-voiced rumination of a novel is about – though also, and indirectly, about much that is implied by its title, which was first that of Thelonious Monk’s shortest major composition, one of my favorites, with its outer, measured clarity and inner, off-balance infinities and shadows. Has Milazzo added the lyrics? I think rather that he has written a deep, interior book about lives that included jazz and everything else. A book that will last.”

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