Books by Mathias B Freese

Near the end of Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert makes an honest admission: "[A]nd it struck me…that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind." That line sums up the isolate game of memorializing a deceased loved one, which is the basic tension in Nina's Memento Mori, an elegy to Mathias Freese's lost wife. The profound responsibility of answering the question "Who was Nina?" is left to the lone memoirist:I can say or write anything I want about her…There is much writerly power in that. I am the executor of her probate in all things now. She is mine now in ways she could not be when alive. I am the steward of her memory.Freese ends up analyzing himself, putting the "me" in "memento" and the "i" in "mori," thanks to ever-giving Nina posthumously providing a therapeutic mirror or "Rosebud," which Freese appropriates from Citizen Kane. But Freese mourns more over the burden of existence than over its loss. Appropriately, for Kane is not about the symbolic sled as much as it's about the cumulative snow that buries it.

"Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers stands above much of the crowd in its commitment to ask, 'What is it to remember?' Mathias B. Freese, tenderly plaiting a web that spreads from Woodstock, Las Vegas, Long Island, and North Carolina, locates friends and family, lovers long since gone, desire and passion sometimes quenched sometimes unrequited, and the harrowing agony that comes from that most soul-crushing word of all, regret. But Tesserae is not a work of sadness and grief. Rather, it is an effort from a trained psychotherapist adept at understanding the feelings that we all have. The quiescence found has a staying effect upon the mind; this memoir lingers in the reader's memory for some time."-- Steven Berndt, Professor of American Literature, College of Southern Nevada

"Freese says that 'memory must metabolize [the Holocaust] endlessly,' and his book certainly turns hell into harsh nourishment: keeps us alert, sharpens our nerves and outrage, forbids complacent sleep so the historical horror can't be glossed over as mere nightmare. The Holocaust wasn't a dream or even a madness. It was a lucid, non-anomalous act that is ever-present in rational Man. In the face of this fact Freese never pulls punches. Rather, his deft, brutal, and insightful words punch and punch until dreams' respite are no longer an option and insanity isn't an excuse."-David Herrle, Author of Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy"... Freese's haunting lament might best be explained (at least to me) by something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville's endless search for answers to questions that perplexed him all his adult life. Melville was incessantly obsessed with what one might call the why of it all-life, death, metaphysical mysteries. Similar to Freese, Melville was repeatedly afflicted with a dark and depressive state of mind."-Duff Brenna, Professor Emeritus CSU San MarcosMathias B. Freese is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, This Möbius Strip of Ifs, was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 in general nonfiction and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust was one of three finalists chosen in the 2012 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest out of 424 submissions.

The i Tetralogy-i, I Am Gunther, Gunther's Lament, Gunther Redux-is the gut-wrenching epic depiction of the dehumanization of man through an incisive observation of three pivotal characters. Each of them, victim, perpetrator, and murderer's son, is inextricably linked by the varying dimensions of their moral nature. Assaying the monumental impact of the Holocaust, this species-shattering event, the tetralogy elucidates a truth about humanity: the Holocaust has forever defined the species as indelibly damaged, capable on a molecular level of killing and consuming its own. The reader experiences this unvarnished-perhaps axiomatic-truth about humanity, which no revisionist can deny. The reader also ponders the risk in forgetting, in sanitizing, in "sweetening" the Holocaust.