The Liminal Void – Karim Ghahwagi
MOUNT ABRAXAS MMXIX
My previous reviews of this author here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/karim-ghahwagi/ & https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/amerika-by-karim-ghahwagi/ and this publisher here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/complete-list-of-zagava-ex-occidente-press-books/
When I read this book in due course, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Green print on stiff red paper. Nearly 70 pages.
This publisher’s long-seasoned aesthetic of printed design upon rich upholstery of materials.
I
Site Tenebra
Pages 11 – 13
And incredibly this is in a chance mutual-synergy with the Laura Mauro story ‘In The City of Bones’ read and reviewed here only an hour or so ago, as in the Ghahwagi we read:
“An indistinct current of static bounced off out cavern walls and was punctuated with a low whisper, an indecipherable incantation, further ghosted underneath a repeated phraseology predisposed to a numeric pattern. […] Our mandate had been issued to us by the Regime in an official decree. We specialized in gathering forensic evidence in the wake of mass casualty events.”
We also learn about other research into carrion activity and introduced to their träumtrawler truck. A refrigerated morgue, and more.
“The water in our well had reddened with a high density of rust.”
Black body-bags, black stones as a communication system, and black static radio signals, I begin to worry whether the printed words are really green and not black? A visual illusion? But no illusion about the words themselves, other than as a process of working through the nature of this ‘warren’ where three women – à la Area x? – are tasked with forensic study of the Regime’s atrocities, but for what purpose? There are some amazing descriptions here and further details that I cannot do justice to here. It is one of those books you need to read and not be told about. But I will continue to tell you about it, for my own benefit of appreciating it. As with the narrator woman here, I sense that knowing – or even just believing – that I am publicly telling something is already half the battle, already half the journey, towards a yet unknown goal concerning that ‘something’.
Pages 20 – 23
“While we assumed that we had been compromised by the Regime’s omniscient surveillance, we had ushered a covert, deeper channel of communication between us. Forged by links established during mutual dreams and nightmares, …”
A thread to open up between us, as we are moved on from the initial Installation, enabling a potential preternatural gestalt to be evoked by my long-seasoned reviewing techniques, but do not necessarily believe me, because I as reviewer of what is happening may be mistaken or telling wilful lies – or both. The words are dense and magical, that you CAN believe.
“…sustained similar trauma.”
As a tantalising blend of Trauma as éclat and Träumerei as dreaming, there is now an amazing description of our three protagonists currently still at their Kafkaesque Regime’s ‘Southern Reach’-synergous ‘Science Installation’ investigating bodily a body that has suddenly appeared, as if fallen from the sky.
Cf today’s remarkable news in Uk: a tweet of man falling from an aeroplane as it approached Heathrow, the iced corpse falling next to a sunbather in his garden in Clapham.
“…the prevalent and oxymoronic sense of nullity.”
Null Immortalis, I suggest, amid our protagonists’ rituals and unseen guidance, a deeply felt poesy of bent spines, missing adam’s apples, masked women and much else. This is a book that somehow resists being reviewed, but we know in our hearts what is happening but continue to fail to impart it to others, others who not only include you but also me! Surveillance without surveillance. It’s reaching beyond X, even beyond its own pre-perceived redactions.
I have not yet read this chapter. Though, before it gets a chance to fully redact itself, I have noticed that it starts with a reference to the Children of the Crimson Sun. In case it is relevant, here is my recent review of the author’s book with that as a title: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/children-of-the-crimson-sun-karim-ghahwagi/
“symptoms of the vortex bends, instigated by the passage through the Taurus proventriculus,”
From triptych to distaff diptych, the narrative force, via extremely rich words crafted into a Methoddical rite of passage, in the true sense of rite, and the true sense of passage as the passing through of the Acclimatisation Chamber of the previously entitled chapter, towards a temple, then possibly exhumed ‘graves’ and a village where the narration’s identities need to be re-established, or established for the first time. Amid fireflies, laments and a musical ‘dying fall’, I sense. Distortions and ‘vestiges of correlative instinct.’ Correlative instinct is the only way I know how to ‘Gestalt real-time review’ in face of such rich narration, even perhaps turning up in person myself hidden so far by a hood or scarf at the end of this set of pages? At least for the nonce – till I pick up this book again.
“she gleaned the face of an old weeping man,”
Man or woman, I truly feel I am in this text myself. Distaff or spear diptych, the text enthuses as well as infuses. Its richness and obliquity beyond measure.
“malleable deceptive convalescent states in this pocket of null.”
Towards temple, village or circus?
“The crowns of doorways, buried to their keyholes, tilted strangely…”
“a strange theatre of cosmic jest,”
You may choose different keys to quote.
Pages 51 – 65
“And what of the strange third current in the undulating tributary, which we felt move the tide of black water and red light in our mutual body?”
#EarthquakeLA
7.1 last night, details still unclear. Hope all are safe. Especially this author if he is there. But we have today in this inspiring climax of this book, “ripples of a vast Red Sea”, “sound of drumming lost its rhythmic pattern, and started to beat out of true”, “ears crammed with boulders and granite”, “that crimson sun in the bowels of the mountain”,…
And today, our news in UK is full of an unusually private royal christening, the one of our Archie, a child and his parents referred to in my earlier review of Children of the Crimson Sun, and today his Godparents are mysteriously kept secret: and here in this amazing richly oblique climax of the Liminal Void “Those very coordinates by which we were held buried in its cradle of being”, “playful gestures of masked children”, and more.
https://etepsed.wordpress.com/739-2/
And thanks for fulfilling the potential of the Träumtrawler. Beyond any ‘collapse into the rear wall of our head’. Our singular head.
“A group of cavorting, cheering children – themselves masked and costumed in the likenesses of animals – ran up the temple steps.”
end