The Bloggers Tale: Chapter One
Listen to the audio of Episodes 1-7 of My Way to Canossa.
A novel by David Brendan O’Meara. (Scroll down for audio by chapters.)
In the year 1077, a German Emperor brings his family to Canossa Castle in Tuscany, where he kneels in the snow outside the gates, begging the Pope to forgive him.
Meanwhile, in 2009, an American history buff rents a minivan so he can drive the Imperial Family on their secret journey across the Alps.
Back home, on the history buff’s bookshelf, are three wildly different—and completely unreliable—versions of what happened at those castle gates: a proto-Nazi self-help book for men, an ultra-Catholic biography for girls, and a pop-feminist telenovela full of wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Thoroughly absurd and yet all-too-real, My Way to Canossa unfolds amid the reactionary politics and technological transformations of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
It isn’t an historical novel of the Middle Ages. It’s an exploration of how the present uses the past.
Listen to the audio of Episodes 1-7 of My Way to Canossa.
Listen to Episodes 8-14 of My Way to Canossa
Listen to Episodes 15-21 of My Way to Canossa