I still ask what the vision means: Jesus and Mary in one, neither one nor the other, but both, intertwined. And with a sweat that cannot be distinguished from the steams of the Earth …
At the beginning of the 13th century an unusual women’s movement calling themselves the Beguines emerged. For the first time in Catholic Europe, a large number of women chose neither marriage nor life in a convent. Instead, they formed small, autonomous communities on the outskirts of various cities in Western Europe.
Spanning one year, from Easter to Easter, the novel follows a small Beguine household in Liège, as it transforms from reformist to messianic, eventually joining forces with the city’s poor and marginalized. Meanwhile, the Beguine Ida starts having visions of the young Virgin Mary, an intricate bureaucracy of Angels, and a transfeminine Jesus. Slowly and reluctantly, Ida steps into her role as a prophet, while trying to surrender herself to the people she loves.
In a keen and vibrant prose, Jonas Eika’s new novel sets out to portray the collective lives of these women who collapsed the patriarchal distinction between laywomen and nuns, by inhabiting an indeterminate in-between. Open Heavens is a wondrous genre-breaking historical novel, exploring themes of divine calling, shame, desire, and what it means to build a new political community.
Author
Reviews
“The world becomes a greater place in the company of Jonas Eika’s masterpiece about the Christian Beguines. […] The dream of another world, where resources and power are redistributed, forms the foundation of this brilliant and magnificent tale, that is Jonas Eika’s new novel Open Heavens. […] There is an ethereal beauty in the portrayals: a keen eye for the light, the colors, the sounds, and the materials, which are not quite of this world. The surroundings and the human beings in them are staged with such lubricity, as if the reader is there as well, and there lies a profound and multifaceted knowledge about humanity in the streak of character portraits the novel paints. Open Heavens is a unique novel in new Danish literature: deeply original, ambitious, visionary and bulging with literary abundance.”
Kristeligt Dagblad, 6/6 stars (DK)
“Jonas Eika revives their authorship with an utopian, religious historical novel […] a potent, epic and progressive narration that brims with sensations, moods, conversations and sacred visions – a transgression of the traditional boundaries for historical novels, not far from being described as a hybrid genre-wise.”
Information (DK)
“A portrait as magnificent as it is ideological. […] Eika calls their work ‘informed fantasy’ and that is quite on point. Open Heavens uses history as its framework, but the message is not historical. […] Eika’s angle is collective and poetic.”
Berlingske (DK)
“A heretical, feminist collective novel about the Church with a capital C’s historical violence, a groundbreaking ode to the long, tiring work of rebirthing the world anew, an anti-capitalistic page-turner and a caringly poetic vision about another and better world in closer cohesion with nature, time, matter and God. […] Eika writes in such a way that things and the world shine in a new, changed light. […] It is a tender, devotional prose – gracefully demure, perhaps – that senses the world through its details and provokes the reader to imagine that things can be different – and perhaps they already are. […] Even though a historical Medieval novel might sound far from the author’s two previous books, Open Heavens is unmistakably Eika’s in its critique toward civilization. The Medieval setting becomes an allegorical reflection of the anguish of our own time […]. Jonas Eika has written a wistful Medieval novel about salvation, the Virgin Mary and the greatest questions. […] a very irresistible ’ointment the size of the sun’.”
Soundvenue (DK)
“Jonas Eika’s new masterpiece […] is 700 pages long. But it is a true page-turner. […] I have seldom read a book that is so historical, yet so contemporary. So full of research and literary spirit; of details and drama; of religion and politics; and of care and fire.”
Politiken (DK)