Room II · The Sacred

The Narcissism
of the Sacred

Peter Sacks

What it costs to be fearless in a culture built on fear.

A Yale literature professor discovers the voice of a fearless man who shatters her world—and learns her own powerful family destroyed him.

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Prelude & Chapter 1

The Narcissism of the Sacred, a novel by Peter Sacks. Imagined cover showing a man and two boys fishing beside a river.

The Story

Isabel Markson, a literature professor traveling in Montevideo, is handed an unpublished manuscript that was quietly pushed out of circulation in the United States decades earlier.

The cafe owner who gives it to her says, “We don’t trust fearlessness anymore.”

Read the interpretive synopsis

The characters

Galen and Isabel

Please Be True

Galen’s life, teaching, and the cost he carries.

Isabel Wakes Up

What happens when the people trained to critique power are also trained to inherit it?

Two Minds Across Time

Galen’s voice and Isabel’s life.

Explore the novel

Power, Belief, and Adulthood

The Title

What the novel means by Narcissism of the Sacred.

Adulthood and Power

Angles of Repose

Different Ways Into the Novel

Each approaches the same story from a different place in life, and each notices something different first.

The Final Movement

An author’s note on the ending and its revelations.

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