Anima Rising

The hilarious if overstuffed latest from Moore (Razzmatazz) draws on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a tale of fin de siècle Vienna. In 1911, painter Gustav Klimt rescues a drowning woman from the Danube canal and brings her back to his studio, where she is cared for by one of his models. The woman has no memory of who she is or how she wound up in the canal. Klimt names her Judith after one of his paintings, and he turns to the world’s leading psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, to help cure her amnesia. When Freud hits a dead end, he taps his colleague Carl Jung, who agrees to hypnotize Judith. The incredible story she narrates under hypnosis involves surviving in the Arctic after being stranded there with exiled mad scientist Victor Frankenstein and his monster and interventions from Raven, an Inuit deity. As Moore delays clarifying whether Judith is telling the truth, his own imagination swings into overdrive. He contemplates the sex lives of Klimt and Egon Schiele, writes pastiches derived from Frankenstein and the Freud-Jung correspondence, and even finds room to include a grating failed artist named Hitler. This shaggy-dog story will test some readers’ patience, though there’s plenty of fun to be had. Fans of Moore’s other artist-inspired novel, Sacre Bleu, will be entertained. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, DeFiore & Co. (May)