David Brendan O'Meara

My Way to Canossa David Brendan O'Meara

My Way to Canossa contains five novellas-one impossible blog, three investigations into three very bad histories, and one regretful recollection-that each have something to do with the Walk to Canossa, the semi-famous (or semi-obscure) event from the year 1077, when an Emperor knelt in the snow outside the gates of a castle to beg forgiveness from a Pope. But this is not an historical novel of the Middle Ages. Instead, My Way to Canossa is a sad, dark comedy that unfolds amid the reactionary politics and technological transformations of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. It's a novel about the uses and misuses of history, and about the construction and the consumption and the selling of historical narratives. Above all, it's the story of the lonely, obscure, and sometimes disposable lives of those who try to imagine the past.