Pustaka Zahra

Pustaka Zahra, an Indonesian book publisher, has agreed and contracted with me to publish the third part of The End of Reason. In August 2004 they published my work The Madness of God. Translated from the original English into Bahasa Indonesia, the work appeared under the title Iblis Menggugat Tuhan (Iblis Accuses God). The Madness of God is the second part of The End of Reason and they have reprinted the work on two occasions since then. In December of 2005 Pustaka Zahra agreed to publish The Men Who Have the Elephant with The Madness of God in a single volume. This publication will likely take place within the next eighteen months. I doubt they’ll have an interest in ever publishing the first part of The End of Reason, which is In Herod’s Keep. This work is the oldest of the three parts and, in many respects, is the least compelling, though the seeds of both The Madness of God and The Men Who Have the Elephant are in evidence within the work.

For those of you with an interest in the development of the book, and I doubt very many of you will have much, here is a brief outline. The End of Reason is not one book, but three. Written over a period of ten years, these three books appear in chronological order. I wrote the first book, In Herod’s Keep, between 1994 and 1998; the didactic or “teaching” stories came first; the narrative framework came after. The Madness of God, a logical extension of the arguments first posed in In Herod’s Keep, was written between the summer of 1998 and the winter of 2000. Unlike In Herod’s Keep, I wrote The Madness of God essentially as I originally planned it. Begun hesitantly in January of 2001, The Men Who Have the Elephant is the third and final book in this triptych. I completed it, and the Apologia that precedes the beginning of The End of Reason in December 2004. While I originally intended at least the first two books to stand alone, these three works are bound together, not merely by style, but also by the questions they jointly pose about theodicy. More importantly, The Madness of God is a potentially dangerous work and must be understood within the context of at least one of the other parts. Pustaka Zahra has agreed to publish The Men Who Have the Elephant, partly to address this danger.

The letter that was written in the last posting below was partly in response to a published review of Iblis Menggugat Tuhan, which although was not critical of the book, nevertheless betrayed a significant misunderstanding of my position as the author in reference to the arguments Iblis (the devil) makes in the work. I wrote this letter also to make very clear my position in opposition to Iblis and his arguments. I had hoped that the work itself made this clear; I still believe a close reading of the work is sufficient to absolve me of all accusations that I am taking Iblis’ part.

If you’re interested in reading The End of Reason in the original English, you can find it at http://www.omphaloskepsis.com/ebooks/pdf/teor.pdf.