The Eunuch Book Author’s Spotlight Charles Fischer

In this week's show we feature author Charles Fischer who teaches humanities at Everett Community College in Washington, focusing on classic literature including Homer, Sophocles and Shakespeare. With a background in ancient Greek, a Ph.D. in English combined with a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Harvard Divinity School, Charles is uniquely positioned to draw on the events of ancient history as the basis of fiction. He lives in Seattle with his wife, the author Lisa Wogan. He is the author of The Eunuch a new book from The Gabbro Head Press.

The Eunuch is a twisted tale of personal love, moral depravity, imperial overreach, and societal decline.  The scope is staggering, the setting exotic, the characters original—and the narrator’s voice is not only compelling but also frequently hilarious. The historical details have been painstakingly researched.  Although it can stand scrutiny as a historical novel, The Eunuch is really an accessible literary mash-up that calls to mind the Game of Thrones novels, Lolita, the Gormenghast novels, and Memoirs of a Geisha, with aristocratic gluttony and sexual indulgence set against the drought and famine of the failing Babylonian empire. 

The central themes of The Eunuch are big and timeless: sex and sexuality, love, greed and ambition, power, betrayal, religion, war and the causes of war. An ambitious writer, Charles realized he couldn’t compete with “the big swinging, literary dicks” of his father’s generation – writers like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike – because times change and he could not write about sex and power in the same way that they did. But through the voice of the insignificant Nergal the Eunuch, Charles was able to address such topics while empowering the weak: who is more important, Nergal asks, the King that slaughters 10,000 or the slave scribe who records the King’s deed for posterity? Charles’s novel is a will-to-power for the powerless that ends in a bang rather than a whimper: Nergal is like a little rodent who gnaws at the foundation of the mighty Ziggurat of Babylon until he causes the
summit to topple. 

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