The Statue That Had No Owner

von Jenny Murfreesboro

152 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

The Statue That Had No Owner follows Nathaniel Cross, an aging potter whose life has been shaped by craft, discipline, and the devastating loss of his wife Clara and young daughter Maeve. In his isolated river workshop, Nathaniel becomes obsessed with an ancient philosophical problem: if a human being is not an eternal, indivisible soul but a temporary assembly of physical and mental processes, can those processes be reconstructed through material craft?Drawing on old metaphysical texts brought by the scholar Elena Crawford, Nathaniel studies the Five Skandhas: Form, Sensation, Perception, Mental Formations, and Consciousness. Rather than treating them as a teaching about impermanence and the absence of a permanent self, he interprets them as an architectural blueprint. He creates five specialized ceramic figures, each built from carefully chosen mineral mixtures intended to embody one aggregate. His goal is not merely to make a memorial, but to force an autonomous presence into fired earth and prove that identity can be manufactured.As the experiment advances, Nathaniel's grief and intellectual pride become inseparable. His apprentice Jared Collins watches his increasingly secretive behavior, while Elena recognizes the danger in turning a philosophical teaching into a literal recipe for life. The statue becomes a physical expression of Nathaniel's refusal to accept mortality: he wants to reconstruct what death has taken, turning loss into a technical problem that can be solved with enough precision, patience, and fire.The climax reveals the limits of that ambition. The assembled figure does not become the restored person Nathaniel hoped to recover. Instead, the ceramic body becomes a mirror for his attachment, showing him that the five aggregates cannot be fused into an eternal owner who stands behind them. When the structure cracks and Nathaniel dismantles it into five separate components, the failure becomes a form of liberation. The pieces are no longer evidence of failed resurrection; they are simply what they are-temporary forms without a hidden master.The ending transforms Nathaniel's relationship with grief. He stops trying to manufacture an immortal identity from clay and returns to ordinary work. With Jared nearby, he sits at the wheel and creates a simple, empty bowl. It is not a vessel for a soul or a monument to the dead, but a useful form made from changing material. The novel closes on acceptance rather than supernatural triumph, suggesting that release comes not from defeating impermanence but from allowing things to exist without demanding that they remain.

• Themen: Belletristik Biografischer Roman / Autobiografischer Roman
• ISBN: 9798182806367
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 22.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Jenny Sullivan Murfreesboro