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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
150 pages, limited to 117 copies.
As you can see, I hope, from the photographs, this is an exquisite physical book in every sense. I shall now read it…
Ayu
O all my Foreign gods, this is the most beautiful proselet of love with a dance partner and of dance itself. With lateral qualities. Not disarming so much as rearming.Zelina
“And yet I warm myself on the flame of your footprints…”Amber
“Ships collide but an island never ventures beyond its own surf.”Selam
“But I didn’t yet know if the ball was an artefact of light or darkness, if it was cousin to the sun or the moon.”Lubna
“I hope one day you will rest in the inadequate shade of my feet and say a prayer.”I sense already that this book will be fictionatronic-rhapsodic paeans to the women the author has met, or maybe some of these women are ones he is about to meet by dint of this book’s imaginative-real magic. I cannot bear the thought of reading these proselets other than in this magical book, cast so cannily. Reading as a true experience. And I also sense this book might yet be the height of possible authorial powers by anyone to create such an experience. At last, after a range of peaks that were high but level, this one might be coming through the clouds as the highest peak of all. Also the book’s seeming cosmopolitan aura takes much of the bad taste of the world today out of my mouth. Whether that is real or imaginary does not seem to matter when under the influence of its tall stiff turning pages.
Marie
“I like carrying objects for her, anything at all, just to show my devotion without being too obvious or maudlin about it.”This, for me, is the optimum love story, fuller, too, than most such stories, despite being the shape and tenor of a proselet rather than of a story proper.
Proseletting in this book is far superior to proselytising, when, as it now seems to portend, it invites us to an acknowledged religious conversion to romantic love by means of quirky procedures, knowing looks and mantras. Especially if these acts are conducted with a certain passion beyond romanticism, that passion deriving from its likelihood of unrequitedness or from being shared with rivals for the same love.
Shubha
Three more separate proselets with forenames as titles. The second one has firemen, too. Now, to be serious, there is no way I will be able in this review to do justice to all these forenamed works by the forename Rhys, the fantastika foreman and fieryman of literature. I honestly sense this book will go down in history. It already promises to be that good. The conceits of love and the keeping of promises, if only, sometimes, just to the letter of those promises. Not slavish love, indeed, but certainly noble and gallant love. Did you ever see that old advert for a box of chocolates, a box that the protagonist took to his love against all the odds of weather, sea, mountain and skydive? Well these works do not represent a mere replica of that ‘hero’, but they are a conceitful apotheosis of him. There are indeed so many new Rhysian conceits, here, metaphysical, ironic, and fantastikal ones, as promised by this book. But I cannot promise to cover them all here. As a hopefully noble and gallant Reviewer, however, I promise to reap the book’s sown gestalt by the end of what promises to be a substantial review, judging by the estimated number of proselets yet to be delivered by each of these tall upstanding pages.Isabel
Dolly
Mengjie
Elodie
Itxaso
Vanessa
I strongly believe the eponyms at the head of each proselet have given the author his greatest inspirations for fiction ever. If indeed any of these works can be called fiction at all.
Peppiina
“It didn’t fit any context…”Other than the author’s pining at home while this eponym had her adventures on her own without him, that fact as well as the absurd-seeming design she chose for her balloon to the North Pole, I was struck by the imputed conceit that the best and most meaningful and emotional-illuminating conceit is one that is out of context or character with itself or even meaningless or simply unbelievable, the best conceit of all combining all these things in one conceit, as it does here.
And Sibelius had lots of horns in his music.
Zsuzsanna
“, but exaggeration is part of the theatre of melancholy, the most flamboyant of all theatres.”Insyirah
“You handed me a kris, a typical knife of your people, and told me to use the blade as a ruler.”Kindred proselets I found, the first a house whence adding leaps together is intended to form a gestalt suicide selflessly to match the mood of the eponym, and the knife as ruler in the latter not as an overruling means of suicide but a straight edge to create the architectural map of the house itself, built for the eponym and the author to live in, but a kris does not have a straight blade…?
I sit here wavering back and forth between the conceits of these two works, maybe forever.
Jimena
The Jimena eponym who uses her first usage of a sleeping bag while camping with Rhys to pretend and actually to become a caterpillar. One human in each of two sleeping bags. Except the caterpillar eats one of them. Then that caterpillar perhaps enters a word that looks like a translation of future but is a sort of typeface with a small L like a human figure inserted rather than a caterpillar, creating today’s second real eponym, this one a woman who can talk like a famous film actress. I remember large moving black and white human heads on huge screens when I was small, being invaded by the caterpillars of a film’s fuzzy wear and tear from the sides of that screen. And about today’s third eponym, its “if we are still together in the future” phrase now means more than it should. Also the fact that Cyrine has a whole kitchen sink and cast of characters in her waking-bag to form a restaurant in the wilds of nowhere….Flutura
Cyrine
Amivi
A very telling fable of conscience, morality, reversal, retrocausality. I tentatively suggest the idea or reality behind it is unique.Charlotte
From Fridge worlds to twin eponym sisters to the natural settling of pyramids to humans BEING to a Slovenian eponym, I wonder, who is like Melania Trump? Plus the nature of table salt.Oksana / Ksenya
Tabarak
Eilah
Aleksandra
I notice, too, the onset, in a small way so far, of typographical trickery that it must be difficult to arrange one’s publisher to bring off as successfully as it seems to have been done here … and the added thought that subliminal things may be going on here beyond that what merely meets the plain reading eye…
Eleftheria
I took the photo below this morning just before reading this intriguingly delightful proselet’s connection with the next eponym accompanying Rhys, both of them visualising the Cyclops’ island and with the Cyclops inside a cave, while imagining their own shoes as boats … and the question of twenty or forty winks needed for napping if you have one or two eyes.The photo seems to have two people closely following as if in double vision (with two other people following that ‘foursome’). My wife and I had only just ourselves walked along that lower promenade, and the front couple now actually look like us doing it!
Simone
From windsocks and the wind’s taste in clothes, over which I shall swiftly pass, we reach a drummer of all manner of drums as well as obsessively drumming household things which I read immediately after watching a new ballet version from Wales of Satie’s Parade (recorded from BBC4 TV last night) where all manner of strange things are used as percussion instruments – then onto a third proselet today, one which starts with worrying whether you are using the right key! And it also evokes the old childhood games of writing your full postal address, ending with …. Earth, Universe.Lisandra
Thérèse
Olivia
Had a splendid time with these eponyms’ crisp tall pages that need, at the centre of the book, to be gently bent back and holding steadily down against the swell of the paper, sometimes with audible noises within the spine. Many more crepitating conceits, and the Marguerite from Cameroon will haunt me the most, with her three children arriving in Europe by studied quiet accepted surprise from such a far off place. But three or two children? The question makes me smile, as does its answer, as does the onward memory of both.Anahita
Misaki
Marguerite
Nadine
Giuliana
Claudette
The first significant shaped text, here a diamond, perfect other than ‘who’ should have been ‘whom’. Otherwise an effective conceit where love itself makes a triangulation of the couple who love each other.I see elsewhere that the forthcoming paperback version of this book already has its cover.
Océane
Three eponym names as perfect Rhysian gems. Loved particularly the conceits arising from the thin country of Chile and, later, the coat too thin against the rain.Jessica
Danique
Bhagya
It seems applausible to link these two eponyms together, in a bath of tea stirred with a giant sugar cube and trying to do less than nothing on an island of beach bars and coconut plaudits.Kwame
Nadja
“Yearnings without earnings?”A sheer Rhysian optimisation of conundrum, a sense of the writer’s lot in life these days, and a uniquely ironical logic layered upon it dealing with choice and taste in literature …. in face of the fire that one day will consume it all?
Reminds me a bit of a dream I once had, where there was a house fire and one of the inhabitants (me) escaped rather later than the others, i.e. barely reaching safety by the skin of my teeth. When asked about my lateness of escape, I said I had been in the middle of reading a sentence by Proust.
Dusica
“, my apotheosis.”I think I can recall the author facebooking this trip while he was on it? Whatever the case, ‘Dusica’ is essential Rhys to read.
Lucy
It is appropriate that I read these two eponyms together today. They resonate with two other books I have just finished from the same publisher who also published this Rhys book. The three books in fact came out on the same day, and they all are optimum representatives of this publisher’s work, they really are. ‘Lucy’ meanwhile amazingly and specifically by dint of floating love blends with the last story of the Oliver Smith book that I just finished reading this very morning; just read both pieces and see for yourself. And ‘Viviana’ takes place in Buenos Aires as does the Eric Stener Carlson book. But there are other co-resonances, too. I am continuously amazed how my gestalt real-time reviews supply me with such strong serendipities.Viviana
Ji-su
“I wish to be more like her.”Silvia
Yasmine
And in Elodie, ‘the narrator’ was. Perhaps he is all his eponyms.
And now here climbing higher but still contiguous is a way for both to be allow departure without leaving?
Raveena
The name itself seems a ravine as narrow and long as this book itself, when compared to other books. Here the thinnest river in the world is revealed to be in Gibraltar, blending with other told tenuities within this sturdy book. Even the author, meanwhile, in this sturdy, if narrow, book, does not know how sturdy this eponym herself will have proved to be, by not accompanying him towards dismay or dream.Buivasa
Seems appropriate, having today elsewhere publicly queried the generally optimistic work of this author by referencing darker aspects of it, that now, later, the first and third eponyms above contain mention of darker aspects, too.Franziska
Jennifer
The middle one is about buying lingerie for women, and its pitfalls.
Mona
Brankica
Dagmara
Saturnina
Great resonance in these four eponyms. Particularly haunting me is the anagram and the gratuitous unrequitedness of mermaidy Mona. Also the extended metaphor of limbo and the statues in Skopje.
Söökhlö
Just a section of this tantalising acrostic eponym:Ophelia
“There are no gorillas here.”Or as ‘gorillas’ appears in this primary text: ‘go-rillas.’ There are no go areas here? There are no no go areas here?
Also, a philosophical syllogism (not exactly, but you know what I mean) embodied here about something Horatio said in Hamlet. Also a striking conceit about baldness and growing beyond one’s hairline? Is it a coincidence that this eponym actually appeared in Hamlet?
Sreyneang
.Amira
“The skeleton regrows its flesh but keeps the orchid heart.”
Only to prove that it is hard to perfect retrocausality! But a rapturous epiphany of conceitfulness at the end of the first eponym above, proving that perfection needs imperfection to perfect it. Heart worn on the wing, if not on the sleeve.
The second eponym above really brought sympathetic laughter to my lips. Perhaps the best eponym so far, but that would be invidious to suggest. But the dancing rehearsal descriptions ought to be pasted up in every dance hall across the world, whether in warzone or paradise. The retrocausality of salsa.
http://rhysaurus.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/dancing-with-my-muse.html
My own personal favourite chapter (am I allowed to have one?) is possibly ‘Thérèse’.
Stella
Stars shining for themselves, and any interpretation of romance merely ours alone. These proselets shine, too, but is my interpretation of them merely mine? I suggest that gestalt real-time reviewing is a thing-in-itself: a Lawrencian, and now, Rhysian balance of stars, Women in Love, and now Eponyms in Love. Inside or outside of love. Meanwhile, I relished the smoothing of our surfaces for stars to sleep on us like lovers smoothing sand on a beach beneath them. The astronomical odds of cats’ lives shared or smoothed out amongst us. And two mirrors instead of lovers in a tunnel of love. Or was that written elsewhere, not in this book, an infinite permutation of interpretations like stars we can see and those we can’t see?Catarina
Esther
Princessa
The peas placed exponentially under the mattress as a Princess test, giving fiction trajectories without friction. An hourglass shape without left or right justification. A seismograph actually causing an earthquake rather than measuring it. An after-image of lunacy. The moon in bed with me. A gestalt of eponyms for tonight’s dreaming. If I do not continue this review you will know I am still threading even stranger burrows towards a Crater on Mars.Sandy
Joramae
Yousra
Hilola
Tameris
“one of those smiles that are so sweet that anyone who receives one is compelled to brush their teeth afterwards…”Georgina
Siranush (1)
Parisa
Siranush (2)
Chlöe
Things speed up here, in both directions, a bus journey with streaming side backdrops and distance in ratio to height again, and a spinning room like a gramophone played on one finger, a city that never sleeps, and a fast getting out of control argument about not having arguments. I thought I would also speed up, in tandem with the author. Oh, one slow thing in this sextet of proselet eponyms: “a lame joke.”
By the way, I still wonder why there is a scythe on the sharp-edged dust-jacket of this book. Is it cutting things fine?
Ernestina
Anonymia
Alice
Rebekah
Samantha
Verniana
Envoi
The last lap, the last lay?
I was going to ask whether this ground-breaking eponymaze of World Muses dressed in Oulipoesy and Fictionatronics is nearer to Byron’s DARKNESS or the same writer’s DON JUAN. Well, the answer is obvious as to which of these two Byronic works this book is NEARER. It is not around the world in eighty days or even lays. It is something far else; it is taller than distance itself. You need not only that scythe or sickle but also Occam’s Razor, Damocles’ Sword and Arthur’s Excalibur perhaps seasoned with Zeno’s Paradox to make the journey of this book fully absorbable within the side backdrops provided for its blade-witted flight from eponym to eponym. A proseletting, gallantry-proselytising, fact-stretching book that is a long narrow eventually faster-than-light broadshaft of crafted paper and words duelling with our, its readers’, otherwise comparatively crass sensibilities. Fame radiating out from its source in shades of not blue but a colour you have never seen before, perhaps on roller-skates as well as on tachyons. Bells summoning bells. Diversity daggers drawn at dawn. This book is written by a true Troubadour of Stirring Romance but also by a Romantic Stirrer of Trouble, the latter rôle for which he is sometimes cast by others or even cast by himself. A Wordsmith whose name isn’t Smith but Whose?
Envoi above is an afterword not an eponym.
Review by Nemonymia.
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