Destiny propels an agnostic journalist to rediscover his faith in this intriguing paranormal puzzler about a mysterious bilocating "lady in blue" from bestseller Sierra (The Secret Supper). In 1629, Sister María Jesús de Ágreda appeared more than 500 times to the Jumano Indians of New Mexico and converted them to Christianity-without ever leaving her monastery in Spain. (The Inquisition suspected her of witchcraft.) In 1991, Spanish journalist Carlos Albert interviews Giuseppe Baldi, a Benedictine priest and musicologist about his 1972 Chronovision machine reported to recapture sounds as well as images from the past. (The Vatican censured Baldi.) Albert later stumbles on Ágreda's monastery in Spain, while in Los Angeles, Jennifer Narody, a former U.S. intelligence agent working on a secret project for the Vatican, deals with unusual dreams and receives a startling stolen religious text. Sierra's heady tale about a true flying nun should entertain Christian paranormal buffs, though some readers might have welcomed more about that Chronovision time machine. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
The Lady in Blue
Narrated by Boyd Gaines
Javier SierraUnabridged — 10 hours, 49 minutes
The Lady in Blue
Narrated by Boyd Gaines
Javier SierraUnabridged — 10 hours, 49 minutes
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Overview
In Los Angeles, Jennifer Narody has been having a series of disturbing dreams involving eerie images of a lady dressed in blue. What she doesn't know is that this same spirit appeared to leaders of the Jumano Native American tribe in New Mexico 362 years earlier, and was linked to a Spanish nun capable of powers of "bilocation," or the ability to be in two places simultaneously. Meanwhile, young journalist Carlos Albert is driven by a blinding snowstorm to the little Spanish town of Ágreda, where he stumbles upon a nearly forgotten seventeenth-century convent founded by this same legendary woman. Intrigued by her rumored powers, he delves into finding out more. These threads, linked by an apparent suicide, eventually lead Carlos to Cardinal Baldi, to an American spy, and ultimately to Los Angeles, where Jennifer Narody unwittingly holds the key to the mystery that the Catholic Church, the U.S. Defense Department, and the journalist are each determined to decipher -- the Lady in Blue.
Editorial Reviews
Jennifer Narody, once a U.S. defense department worker, sees it. So did Mexico's Jumano tribe over 300 years ago. And so does journalist Carlos Albert in the midst of a snowstorm that brings him to the door of a forgotten convent. It's a vision of a lady in blue, and she's at the center of this new work from the author of The Secret Supper. With an eight-city tour. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
An ecclesiastical thriller based on the legend of the Lady in Blue, an apparition said to have prepared indigenous Americans for the arrival of the conquistadores and their missionary Catholicism. Sierra's latest work (The Secret Supper, 2006, was his first published in the U.S.) will again spark comparisons to Dan Brown. The novel features, among others, nuns able to project themselves long distances and occupy two spaces simultaneously; a journalist propelled by mysterious "coincidences" to investigate a mysterious entity, the Lady in Blue; a young American woman with psychic gifts who's plagued by detailed, persistent dreams; and an Italian priest and music professor long engaged in a shadowy Vatican project called Chronovision that derives from the idea that "harmony was capable of provoking altered states of consciousness that permitted priests and initiates . . . access to ‘superior' realms of reality." Sierra mixes fact and fiction adeptly but tendentiously, and sometimes seems less a novelist than a polemicist intent on fashioning mysticism into pseudoscience. The prose and characters can be wooden, the fictional accoutrements crude, but Sierra makes it all entertaining, intermixing history, churchly intrigue, folklore, spycraft, musicology and conspiracy journalism to amusing, if not always plausible, effect-and all of it moving toward a surprising conclusion. The book is not always satisfying, but the interest of the material-time travel! music-induced trances! astral projection! larcenous angels with code names and walkie-talkies!-wins out in the end.
"The Lady in Blue is the haunting and evocative tale of the triumph of modern spirit and science over a 400-year-old conspiracy. Javier Sierra's groundbreaking historical research opens our eyes to a world we thought we knew, and revisits, in a surprising way, the devastating clash between Catholic Europe and the far more ancient world of the American Southwest." — Katherine Neville, bestselling author of The Eight and The Magic Circle
"This fantastic story imparts an alternative, expanded view that we do not usually find in our academic, politically motivated history books. This is what Javier Sierra brings to us in his most recent novel, The Lady in Blue. Read this book before it's made into a screenplay. You will be happy you did." — Skip Atwater, president and executive director of the Monroe Institute, an organization dedicated to working with audio sound patterns in the exploration of human consciousness
"Javier Sierra has done it again! His last book, The Secret Supper, left readers wanting more and Javier has given them just what they have been waiting for with The Lady in Blue! Each chapter keeps you completely captivated and at times makes you look over your shoulder looking for the spirit of the Spanish nun. I'm completely in love with this book and it's a must read!" — MaryRose Occhino, author of Sign of the Dove and radio show host of "Angels on Call," on Sirius Stars 102
A seventeenth-century nun converts New Mexican Indians to Christianity without ever leaving her convent in Spain. In 1972, a Benedictine priest invents a machine reputed to capture sounds and images of the past. A series of coincidences links an agnostic Spanish journalist and an American woman experiencing recurring dreams of a luminous blue lady. In addition to these elements, secret sects, top-secret military projects, a four-hundred-year-old church conspiracy, and a possible murder keep Boyd Gaines juggling the real with the surreal. Gaines treats faith-based explanations as evenhandedly as suggestions of the paranormal, always staying in touch with the characters’ truths. His reading of Javier Sierra’s (THE SECRET SUPPER) intriguing new work is magical enough to keep minds reeling. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170480517 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2007 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
ONE
Venice, Italy
Spring 1991
Treading with a light step, Father Giuseppe Baldi left the Piazza San Marco at sunset.
As was his custom, he walked along the canal to the Riva degli Schiavoni, where he took the first vaporetto headed to San Giorgio Maggiore. The island that appeared on every postcard of Venice was once upon a time the property of his religious order, and the old priest always regarded it with nostalgia. Time had brought many changes. Omnia mutantur. Everything was subject to change these days. Even a faith with two thousand years of history behind it.
Baldi consulted his wristwatch, undid the last button of his habit, and, while scanning the boat for a seat close to the window, took the opportunity to clean the lenses of his tiny, wire-rimmed glasses. "Pater noster qui es in caelis...," he murmured in Latin.
With his glasses on, the Benedictine watched as the city of four hundred bridges stretched out before him, tinged a deep orange.
"...sanctificetur nomen tuum..."
Without interrupting his prayer, the priest admired the evening as he glanced discreetly to either side.
"Everything as it should be," he thought to himself.
The vaporetto, the familiar water bus used by Venetians to get from place to place, was almost empty at this hour. Only a few Japanese and three scholarship students whom Baldi recognized as being from the Giorgio Cini Foundation seemed interested in the ride.
"Why am I still doing this?" he asked himself. "Why am I still watching the other six-o'clock passengers out of the corners of my eyes, as if I was going to find that one of them was carrying a journalist's camera? Haven't I already spent enough years holed up on this island, far from them?"
Fourteen minutes later, the water bus dropped him off on an ugly concrete dock. A gust of cold air burst in as he opened the cabin door, and everyone braced against the night air. No one paid any attention as he disembarked.
In his heart of hearts, Baldi cherished his undisturbed life on the island. When he arrived at his cell, he would wash, change his shoes, eat dinner with the community, and then bury himself in reading or correcting exams. He had followed that daily ritual since he had arrived at the abbey nineteen years before. Nineteen years of peace and tranquillity, certainly. But he was always on guard, waiting for a call, a letter, or an unannounced visit. That was his punishment. The kind of load that is never lifted from one's shoulders.
Baldi restrained himself from giving in to his obsession.
Was there a more agreeable life than the one his studies afforded him? He knew the answer was no. His various duties as professor of pre-polyphony at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory allowed him the peace of mind that had always eluded him as a young man. His students were hardworking. They attended his lectures with moderate enthusiasm and listened as he explained the music of the first millennium, spicing his lectures with interesting anecdotes. In short, they respected him. The faculty admired him as well, even though he sometimes missed classes because he was absorbed in his research.
And yet, such a stress-free environment never managed to distract him from his other pursuits. They were so "confidential" and long-standing that he had rarely even mentioned them to anyone.
Baldi had come to San Giorgio in 1972, exiled for crimes owing to music. The Cini Foundation offered him more than he would have dared to request from his superior: one of the best libraries in Europe; a convention center that on more than one occasion had hosted UNESCO conferences; and two scholarly institutions dedicated to Venetian music and ethnomusicology that so intoxicated him. To a certain extent, it was logical that the Benedictines had made the effort to create that paradise of musicology at San Giorgio. Who if not the brothers of the Order of Saint Benedict would busy themselves with such devotion to that ancient art? Was it not Saint Benedict himself who, once he had established the rules for his order in the sixth century, went on to create the fundamentals of modern musical science?
Baldi had studied the subject thoroughly. He was the first, for example, to appreciate that Saint Benedict's decree, which required all members of his order to attend eight religious services a day, was based entirely on music. A fascinating secret. In fact, the prayers that he and his brothers recited daily were inspired by the "modes" still employed in the composition of melodies. Baldi proved that matins (the prayers said at two in the morning during wintertime) corresponded to the note do, and lauds, recited at dawn, corresponded to re. The offices of the first, the third, and the sixth hours, performed at six, nine, and twelve noon, corresponded to mi, fa, and sol. And the hour of strongest light, none, at three in the afternoon, corresponded to la, while the prayers recited at dusk, during the setting of the sun, corresponded to ti.
That was the class that had made him famous among his students. "Notes and hours are related!" he would boom from his podium. "To pray and to compose are parallel activities! Music is the true language of God!"
And yet Baldi the old soldier had still other discoveries hidden in his study. His thesis was astounding. He believed, for example, that the ancients not only knew harmony and applied it, via mathematics, to music, but that harmony was capable of provoking altered states of consciousness that permitted priests and initiates in the classical world to gain access to "superior" realms of reality. He defended his idea over the course of decades, doing battle with those who asserted that such sensations of spiritual elevation were always brought about by means of hallucinatory drugs, sacred mushrooms, or other psychotropic substances.
"And how exactly did they 'use' music?" Baldi would ask rhetorically, becoming more animated. He admitted that for the wise men of history it was enough to develop a mental "wavelength" adequate for the reception of information from "far away." It was said that in this state, those adept in magic could reawaken any moment in the past, no matter how remote. Put another way, according to Baldi, music modulated the frequency of our brain waves, stimulating centers of perception capable of navigating through time.
But these techniques, he explained with great resignation, had been lost.
While many questioned Baldi's outlandish ideas, even the fiercest polemics had in no way soured his jovial and friendly outlook. His silver hair, athletic deportment, and honest face gave him the look of an irresistible conqueror. No one seriously believed he was seventy-five years old. In fact, had it not been for his vow of chastity, Baldi would have broken the hearts of many of his female students.
That day, serenely unaware of the events that were about to unfold, Baldi smiled as he entered the Benedictine residence, walking at his usual lively pace. He hardly even noticed Brother Roberto waiting for him in the doorway, looking as if he had something urgent to tell him.
Copyright © 2007 by Javier Sierra
Translation copyright © 2007 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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