Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen

the long version

Description by Martin Nakell: "On the banks of Gowanus Canal, a fetid stream in a squalid Brooklyn neighborhood, Hans Knudsen, son of a liberal Lutheran minister, seeks among the warring pressures of consubstatiation, transsubstantiation, and no-substantiation, the old world and the new-new world, the Cogito and the un-self, Martin Luther and Descartes, the abstract and the concrete, for a way into modern, post-religious culture, hope, and life-- not so much a novel as an investigation, a bildungsroman whose hero has no magic mountain to ascend or descend, but who yet desires that the intellectual and spiritual contexts for a life might still exist." -- from back cover.