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20 April 2019
THE UNEASY
by Andrew Hook
“Nothing was so clear as interpretation.”
What is a pipette? This novella is. A powerful vision of a city and its cafes and pent-up sex. Its muscularity of wordy surrealism made of chicken parts in the mouth. Beast masks. A perfumery, too. Lavender. Leaving, suspensefully, its central synchroni-city of Paris nameless but clear. Our lady Imogen. A spent match mark on Imogen’s stomach followed later by another man’s cigarette mark on a wall. A peeled tattoo. A woman called Imogen on the rut quest in a foreign city; a woman stalking men, who could ever think it! A creative joining of disparate things as in Breton’s surrealism. Bacon and pork, where the former is an artist. Breton and a Briton. London day and Paris night. Hopefully not a spoiler, under a vulva sky, if not a vanilla one, she finds her man. Visits with him, by the end, among other places, the Ile de la Cité explicitly, amid “the sexual power of monuments”, where “Gargoyles tottered” in the heat. “Porcelain cracked”, not pork. “Fenders steamed.” She is finally our lady. “I am shame.” Arguably skewered like meat or even crucified by this weekend’s passion as I write this in real-time. Yet a hindsight prophecy about what just happened a few days ago in the same city, but written about here how long ago? A genius loci, supreme. A pipette squeezed spot on, I feel.
“It is easy to flirt with hindsight.” My previous reviews of this author HERE
A quote from another Eibonvale Press novella published simultaneously with the above one: reviewed here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/371-2/