About the Book Inspired stylistically by such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Jaroslav Hacek, and James Joyce, and thematically by my lifelong interest in the Catholic religion, the monstrous and incredible life of Adolf Hitler, and the endlessly fascinating history of France–specifically, that dreadful period from 1940 to 1944–I started The Adorations soon after my novel Killoyle was published but before its companion The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad came out. In an alternating series of now-desultory, now-manic intermissions between jobs, I spent about ten years writing the book, which evolved into two books, or rather one book inside another, a double-decker along the lines of Nabokov's The Gift. I have always loved true originality in writers, technical wizardry in the service of literature, and the concept of the novel as a finely tuned machine. I made my own contribution to such literary mechanisms with the imitation footnotes in the Killoyle novels, in which I see narrative and sub-narrative working together like the cogs and gears in a watch. A natural progression from that point is the "double-time" structure of Adorations, whereby the time frame of one narrative predates that of the other at the beginning but gradually catches up as we progress from 1907 to the present: an additional technique to challenge me, and the reader.