The Big Book Of Classic Fantasy (3)
VINTAGE BOOKS 2019
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
MY REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/22826-2/
IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
VINTAGE BOOKS 2019
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
MY REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/22826-2/
IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
Translated by Ian Johnston
“She sat erect, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.”
I can confirm that I have, in the last few hours, studiously reread this famous novella, the basic plot of which you must already know. When first reading it years ago, I assumed it was didactic about families making ends meet, with their son who is a conscientious travelling salesman called Gregor Samsa (Samson with his hair shorn?), waking up to find himself a bug. Well, today, the whole work satisfyingly became pure l’art pour l’art for me. With an apple embedded in the bug’s back after attacked with apples by his old off-the-wall Dad. His young teenage sister’s violin playing, a girl who eventually stretched her body at the end voluptuously as a woman on a bus, having grown up even while we did read this work. His caring and naïve mother. The feisty cleaning woman. The clutter of the apartment that they eventually shared with three male lodgers, two of whom “hopped” at the end, on being evicted. And Gregor’s own bodily contortions throughout, understanding what his family said, but they not him. His weak flips, his inching forward, and so forth that poignantly contrast with the hops and leaps as cores elsewhere in this whole book so far. He does manage, meanwhile, to unlock his own door from the inside and sometimes hang lugubriously from the ceiling. The whole story is utterly poignant, yet deliciously fanciful, factored into by Pinteresque absurdism. The ostrich feather, notwithstanding.
“…for he noticed with horror that he did not understand yet how to maintain his direction going backward.”
“…then he ran back and dived through the hole in a the wall.”
The Guelphs and Ghibellines in history, or Romeo and Juliet, or Dante Alighieri, notwithstanding, this is the story of Alderic’s using a dragonleap to reach where the eponymous hoard could be burgled, to tap into the hoard’s circular-economy of the man-eating Gibbelins, a hoard housed in their tower, a tower ensorcelled by a river called Ocean, not burgled simply by Alderic entering via its door but trying to crack open its actual stonework AS a tower. History always has unhappy endings, we always find. Causing any future audit trails to be similar. Challenge and Response, the lesson of Toynbee.
“Is it not better to leave the Gateway behind — unless he dare go through it?”
The story of Herndon who tried to put the stamp of legitimacy on pillage in China during the Boxer suppression. The eponymous glass is beautifully described leading to the previous story’s dragonleap – as I put it – here more a multi-dragonspin, alternating with a dragoncrawl, their claws to furrow human flesh – and the glass gateway towards a fantastical realm where Herndon’s romance with a small-breasted girl also plays a part. Draw your own moral or amoral from this fabulous fable of a “cleft”, a whispering yellow light, beauty even in horror. And now a “bulging” hoard by latter-day Goths “sacking imperial Rome”, to match that in Dunsany’s tale of Guelves and Gibbelins!
My previous reviews of A. Merritt: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/the-big-book-of-science-fiction/#comment-7796 and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/the-weird-2/
by E.F. Benson
“, and he heard them hopping downstairs in the direction of the garden door.”
My marbles, that is. This boy wants to experience things before he grows grown-up from age 10 to 70, like me. This work is a wonderful discovery for me. Thank you, big Revamenders’ book. A blend of entering Narnia, Wonderland and The Fruit Stoners’ domain, mixed with the ‘nonsense’ of nursery rhymes, ranging from Noah’s Ark to Miss Muffet’s tuffet. A pin-partridge. And a giant spider that “leaped” to this tuffet as some sort of puberty buster? Nah, this story has no implicit symbols, only childhood’s wonders…when to choose to be invisible would have been nice.
“At this moment David heard an irregular kind of hopping noise coming down the passage,…”
Translated by Gio Clairval
“…we should not be obsessed with the vain pursuit of deciphering God’s each and every intent.”
‘…nor any author’s, I say. Each a fallible God of his book.’ — Dr. Nemonymous.
A rare oddity, a new anthropomorphised Bierce, that pays attention in any building of gestalt in literature and it is what it says on the tin, and ironically in contiguity with David Blaize’s version of Noah’s Ark: “It is unlikely that a new Noah will come forth, who would good-naturedly want to build a saving ark for these creatures.”
“…I agree with my dear friend Dr. Negelinus in thinking that this bestiary will soon be of no practical use, only to be valued as an antique curiosity. After all, there is every sign of imminent terrestrial catastrophe,…”
Entries such as Becher the rocket and Cabell (James Branch) the centaur to match this book’s earlier connected items, and no doubt future ones, too. But I shall dabble only in those authors whose work has already been featured in previous pages, particularly The Chesterton (G.K.)’ that can “stroll, walk, stagger, march, bounce, jump, run”, ‘The Kafka (Franz)’, a moon-blue mouse, ‘The Hesse (Hermann)’, a lovely forest turtledove, ‘The Meyrink (Gustav)’, the only mooncalf that fell to Earth,… Oh, I must also mention GB Shaw who turns cartwheels, and, in connection with an inscrutably named creature, two beetles sliding up and down on a wooden fountain pen “always in opposite directions.”
Translated by Arthur Livingston
“‘Very well! See you later!’
‘The later the better,’ said the alligators.”
A deadpan deliciously pointless tale of alligators on a South American river facing the first challenge of the chug chug of a human steamer and its disruption of their food, the fishes. Involving alligator-made dams, a Sturgeon and a Torpedo and – despite my fear of spoilers – they blew a warship “into fifteen thousand million pieces…” Things later settled down, as things always settle down. Till today? Well, hope to see you later.
Cf my real-time review in 2011 of the novel WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Capek: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/war-with-the-newts-by-karel-capek/
“…that elder time when woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized.”
But is it a coincidence that there is an island in this story not a million miles away from Swift’s Laputa (la puta!) and Gulliver is mentioned towards the end? This, meanwhile, is a tall story of an exploding boat (compare the one in the previous story) and a sea-woman narrator (“a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines”) telling this tale to the male-sounding author, being shipwrecked on a volcanic island that she laters calls Anita, because it (she) has a heart, and has spurned a shipwrecked man who left a warning sign about the island… well, I could go on and on, but a summary would not do justice to its feisty charm, its feminist heart as if the story itself is an island with a feisty personality, but also its ability to be interpreted differently from that! Its flung rocks and floating ricochets of things and ideas so in keeping with this book.
by Stella Benson
“But you have no idea what arduous work it is, breaking in a wild broomstick to the saddle.”
This is a sheer revelation. A surprising key to this whole book if you let it all flow over you and don’t impart that key to anyone else. But it is not to be skimmed or skipped. Or leapt over. Unless your name is Rrchud (sic). (He is referred to several times in the text but we never meet him.) A story to give you “nerve-storms”, a committee of committed wartime ladies in London who talk sense when all the rest of us talk nonsense, visited by a stranger, another lady, who turns out to call herself a witch. One male character we do meet called the Mayor, but we can dispose of him without further thought. And the witch’s house (called Living Alone) on Mitten Island. Full address provided. Oh, I forgot the ferryman. Reminds me of my own novella “Ladies.” But have I written that yet?
Translated by Ekaterina Sedia
“You’re saying my nostrils are turned inside out?”
Which gives some oblique meaning to the previous Nose stories in this book? And who knows what we know and what we SHOULD know. An incredible mad-scientist tale in earlier twentieth century Russia pitching cynicism against idealism affecting future behaviour learnt from knowledge of the past’s pain now accreted or diluted in individual set pieces that once happened (including issues now revealed between the inventor and his friend), a revelation by dint of the eponymous invention where the layered sounds of every location can be reproduced, listened to, thus enabling or disabling required future behaviour in the optimum socialist state. I only hope we can stamp on the Internet, too, to disable such artificial laundering of thought and chicanery, like Facebook’s subliminal political advertising…. a vital work for our times revealed in English, it seems. Layered spoken sounds, though, is quite a new language when lumped together, I guess. The pareidolia of stone-breaking versus the art of sculpture, notwithstanding. This story’s “Abilities Chambers” versus Chambers’ “Lethal Chambers”, too. And the previous story’s nerve-storms now factored in.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/the-big-book-of-science-fiction/#comment-7745
by David Lindsay
“Shaping, my father, I am hoping you can hear me. A strange man has come to us weighed down with heavy blood. He wishes to be pure.”
…thus prays the eponymous woman with strange bodily appendages that make her seem alien, if beautiful, to Maskull, an earthman like us, who seems to have acquired the same appendages, appendages of angelic empathy and asexual physicality between. The heavy blood she allows mixing with her own light blood, a sort of symbiotic menstruation that eases his ability negotiating the differing chemical affinities and physics of this world. Ma and skull seem meaningful in this context to me, almost. The different colours evoked. Shaping is her God who kindly mixes with his flock unlike our invisible God. Another name for him is Crystalman, that seems almost like the word Christian? The climate is evoked, including its inimical period of Blodsombre. But, equally, we have described to us – for their own sake – in tune with this whole Revamender book so far – other passengers of Lindsay’s “mighty sense symphony”, viz. plants with revolving roots that move en masse, a swarm instinct plunging in and out the ground as a means of motion; then a balloon-shaped body flying as it is paddled by five webbed feet; and “a fantastic little creature […] waltzing along on three legs […] by means of a series of complete rotations.”
Translated by Gio Clairval
“Yeah, right. It’s like Rip’s night. A one-century-long night.”
An exquisite portrait of a man who thinks he is getting old, a painter who once sought fame, regretful of some of the decisions he has made, marital and otherwise, and he hears a sound that pervades a mountainous ravine. It has also already pervaded this book: a murmuring, a buzzing, a whispering, a harmony from an unknown source, a self-made tinnitus, or whatever.
“It came from afar, by a string of ricochets, reflections, resonances.” He relates this sound to a book he read as a child of a magical city…. And I – who feel I am an old man, too – relate it to this whole revamender book in which I first read this momentous work. Whether read first as a child or read first as an old man, the poignant, sometimes inspiring, sometimes regretful, effects are the same, I feel.
“The city existed. Because a man had seen its reflection and another man had heard its echo.”
Translated by Gio Clairval
A brief fable of man’s taking advantage of man in a dog-eat-dog world, like keeping a servant without pay for 20 years as a part of a fake news promise of immortality. Climbing as part of this book’s gestalt. Yet, this story really LIVED for me forever, because only half an hour ago, by happenstance, I read a story here called ‘The Tree of Self-Knowledge’ that has now become in miraculous mutual-synergy with this one. The best synergy yet.
(Excerpt from ‘The Worm Ouroboros’)
Please forgive me, but I found this High Fantasy excerpt unreadable today. Please comment below if you think I have missed any connections to the Gestalt of this review by my not reading this work.
When I real-time reviewed the VanderMeers’ massive THE WEIRD in 2011, there were a few stories that I eschewed, but at least three of them I did end up reading and reviewing quite positively later in the then real-time. Who knows, but this Eddison may end up being reviewed by me!
Strange, though, I do recall reading (and enjoying!) the *whole* of THE WORM OUROBOROS in the 1970s when it was published by Ballantine Books…
AT THE BORDER by Der Nister
Translated by Joseph Tomaros
“This way, as the bird flies.”
This is the perfect discovery for me, the perfect inspiration to clinch a gestalt for this book, a Biblical-style apotheosis of ‘Classic Fantasy’ fiction, as the leaps, hops etc. — because AND in spite of Zeno’s Paradox — can now become the smooth flight of a bird and the potential “giant steps” of humanity. A pilgrimage and quest, taunted by lepers, helped by camels, diverted by the formality of a temple, our two candles finally lit. Our future clinched, too. So says the Reviewer.
“and all that could be heard was a humming. . . .“ (ellipsis sic) as sound now in the desert as well as earlier in the mountain.
I have to admit I skipped and leapfrogged some of this literally larger-than-life story of logging and lumber, and blue oxen, and outlandish cooking and other folklores. It might be me, it might be my nationality, or it might be this story has been planted here simply to outgrow even my head! And for the second time only in this book so far, I ask anyone out there to drop me a comment below if they think I have missed anything in this story that would substantiate my still growing gestalt real-time review.
Translated by Ekaterina Sedia
This is probably the most inscrutable, most haunting piece in this book so far, and that is saying something, if nothing! It reminds me of big-headed people, with or without toothache.
“…and we like people who are just like us, we find charm in that.”
“, the lace of the legends spun from ship’s rigging, seafoam,”
“Who’s walking on the roof?”
“, I know about it. And I don’t understand. Maybe you can explain this to me.”
Just two and half pages, but would be worth owning this massive book for this alone.
Translated by Ekaterina Sedia
“, a large rust-colored rat jumped out and flopped to the floor with a nauseating
shriek.”
This is another Grin work, a novelette, and an important discovery now translated to English. Starting with a man selling books in a market, then his unrequited love (and hers for him) regarding a woman (also selling books) who helps him with his collar by means of a safety-pin. Then, via perhaps the Marienbad-like delirium of illness, he is housed in a building of books and papers as a labyrinth, with a cabinet of food provisions and signs of rats, rats that seem to give a Biblical significance to those who catch them. But all that only scratches the surface of this exquisite fantasy, one that tentacularises its audit trail with all the bodily spasms of this Revamender book, plus various further mentions of humming, for example the humming of a telephone that layers sounds like Zazulya’s Gramophone of the Ages, enabling random numbers to provide a forgotten telephone number. There are “rhombic patterns across doorways”, walking on trash and paper and slippery manila folders, copied books rising to his chest, and “Everything indicated the dark stab of coincidence”, “a long chain of loud improbabilities”, and “nighttime nonsense festooned itself with ephemera of sleepless fantasies”, lightning sparks on the backs of cats, accreting a “faith in complex and meaningful coincidences”, shapeshifting to the extent of doubting the identity of his loved one, and a section of text that seemed very important to my long-term project of gestalt real-time reviewing at the top of the second column on page 657. An unmissable substantial work. Oh, yes, please don’t forget the scenes scavenging for firewood in the attics where he first lived. This whole book is like a series of interconnecting attics….
“Kull with a single mighty leap hurled himself into the room.”
A Lemurian, Atlantean, Valusian swords and sorcery story wherein many tribally dynastic and pre-Machiavellian machinations prevail, with bluffs and double bluffs between historical accidents, age and experience, masks and shape-shifting. Where the snakemen’s inability to make vocal articulation of the words “Ka nama kaa lajerama” proves something beyond such bluffs, as the wearing of some leaping dragon or winged dinosaur brooch also proves something t’other way about. A swashbuckling tale also comprising intriguing triage and paranoia, to the extent, I extrapolate, of your even seeing yourself as a competing creature in disguise! A Robert E Howard work ostensibly placed in this book as a significant further oblique elucidation of this book’s perceived gestalt, now comparing hops, leaps and jumps with the slithering of snakes within the same entity!
“Leap and slay swiftly or else we are undone.”
Translated by Michael Tangerman
“If he seemed not-of-this-world, then I too might be a phantom.”
I vividly recall reading two or three stories by this author in the 1960s, when they were featured in Horror Anthologies edited by Peter Haining. I can easily imagine he had a villain in one of them called the Tanger Man! I am confident that if I had also read this one in the 1960s, it would have stayed with me just as durably. It is not really a horror story, despite the author’s pen-name being assonant with a the most famous horror writer of all. Today, I am entranced by its image of a horizonless sea and the spectacular mirage that the narrator sees there after a train ride simply to see such a mirage. A temporary insanity? The jet-black triangles, piled on top of each other, give some clue, I guess, as to the nature of the binoculars on the train ride back home and how they were used, reportedly, to catch a glimpse of an erotically beautiful young girl from the top of a high building inside a peep show contraption among the sideshows at the bottom of that building. The brocade coming to life on an almost three-dimensional tapestry shown to him on the train, depicting a man who was real enough to grow older into the old man he now was on that tapestry, and the young girl a tapestry-made figure and thus ageless. There is something intensely poignant about all this. A substantive story of provocative and tantalising beauty.
Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
I reviewed this as part of my Gestalt study of the author’s complete stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/10/06/collected-stories-vladimir-nabokov/
As follows:
===========================
A VISIT TO THE MUSEUM
“Everything was as it should be: gray tints, the sleep of substance, matter dematerialized.”
The perfect masterpiece of a museum visit. Mixed with the constructive madness written by a madman about a sane man, as apotheosised later by Ishiguro’s ‘The Unconsoled’ (my review here) arriving at some sort of Narnian outcome beyond the museum! And his Russian paranoia of the time. And the scientifically indeterminate object from Kiernan’s ‘Far From Any Shore’ (reviewed yesterday here). “To dig in the past. […] a dirty bathtub,…”
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Having just re-read it, I can now infer the concept of insanity standing upon the shoulders of insanity, or insanity leapfrogging insanity, to gain even insaner dimensions of insanity. Also, with reference to the joker in the museum claiming its steam radiator was one of the exhibits, I have often been known to point at parts of art galleries themselves as being part of the art being shown.
THE WATER SPRITE’S TALE by Karel Čapek
Translated by Dagmar Hermann
“That’s why water isn’t mute anymore. That’s why it jingles and tingles, rustles and murmurs, trickles and bubbles, splashes, hums,…”
…and many other things as a results of this charming tale.
One water sprite that unmuted water, and another who set the blue of the sky into water.
A story with many other delightful details of water sprites.
And significant that it is this book that now makes such knowledge better known, particularly: “No one before him had jumped into the air. Croakoax was the first.”
Translated by William A. Lyell
This may be the most important story so far in this book, one with countless quotes I could make, so I won’t quote any. It is not contemporarily didactic. How could a piece published in 1932 possibly be didactic particularly for our communal fate in today’s dying world, as well as for the machinations of politics today (Brexit and Trump), and even for Boris Johnson in a remarkable paragraph about his making it to number ten. Yet it is thus didactic! Including, also, a cat Canetti ‘crowds and power’ syndrome of sidestepping, eddying and making bodily Mexican waves along one-sided streets. It is relevant to my growing Gestalt for this book, too, in a big way! Just read it and see. It leaves the brain tingling.
“…Coyote thought he could juggle his eyes […] He took out his eyes and tossed them up…”
Like keeping up with his own jumps, without his body jumping? It is as if he was so deflated by getting the wrong name given to him by the Spirit Chief, he needed to do this.
A seemingly throwaway tale of the naming of the animals, but it keeps bouncing back into my mind. Must mean something. (If I had my time all over again, I would LOVE to emerge from my own nemonymity into someone with the wonderful name this author has!)
“And, Grandmother, how odd your eyes look!”
“The water there was too deep for any wading […] the man was not wading, he was walking vigorously as if he were on dry land.” Later, out of the lake: “taking short quick steps as if his legs were not long enough for his body,…” this being Uncle Monday, a friend of this book’s earlier alligators, who becomes part of the community and competes with a woman who, like him, is a hoodoo operant. The story concerns the outcome of that rivalry. By the way, Uncle Monday can self-heal lost limbs, with a method I would call ‘hawling’ alligators… On one level, this is another throwaway tale but it seems exactly right for this book. I don’t really know how, though. Perhaps it has historic importance outside of the purity of its text and of my gestalt factoring it in? [I sometimes think I am a sort of hoodoo hawler like Uncle Monday, myself. Walking on water, not really my thing, though. (Level leaping?)]
,
Translated by Marian and James Womack
“Everything comes to the Moon, and everything falls silent here, falls silent forever.”
…except whoever tells us this?
Anyway, what the title says – and it reads a bit like Rhys Hughes experimenting with Breton’s automatic writing as seeded by nursery rhymes. Quite beautiful, with shooting stars and choruses of frogs, Rose-Cold taken in one fell swoop on rising smoke by a cow to the moon in order to skate there. With anthropomorphisation of diaphanous near-abstractions like smoke and sighs and glances-at-balloons, as well as more tangible things, all taken to to the moon to compete with Rose-Cold. To be processed and absorbed by us like all this book’s works.
Translated by John Curran Davis
“, as that raucous throng stormed the shop, he leaped in a single bound onto a shelf piled high with bales of cloth,”
…that, believe it or not, is the crux of this story and perhaps of this whole book, as we, in this amazing somehow mundane yet wild renaissance-fresco of a fantasy, have the bales of cloth in the author’s father’s shop blended with these pages as sheets of paper (cf Grin) or paper birds or real birds in his attic, also in battle with his servant Adela, or mass hysteria of all us mob of readers trying to bring him down in an orgy of meaning and meaninglessness. A “cloth cosmogony”, too. A Boschian as well as a Tintoretto fresco, with carrion laid low below. All part of some Autumn storm of Autumn colours, an Autumn or FALL perfect for today in my real-time of October 3rd. By the way, have you heard of a musical ‘dying fall’ that is often uplifting in the context of the music, well, the finale of this piece is a perfect example of such a dying fall — this finale being, ironically, a rising towards a quiet contented normality in his life. “…Father saw the shop assistants rising from their sleep. They rose from among the bales of cloth and yawned in the sunshine.”
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My real-time review in 2012 of a mighty multi-authored anthology that was subtitled ‘A Homage to Bruno Schulz’:
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/this-hermetic-legislature/
My 2011 review of another work when it appeared in the Revamenders’ massive THE WEIRD:
[[Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass – Bruno Schulz
“Here we reactivate time past…”
Images and themes from Proust, Kafka, Aickman, Sakutarō, plus another type of sleep-sickness, decorative bunches of black ferns, the ‘sameness-of-places’ as in shops, a bookbinder who becomes an angry dog (at the arrival of ebooks in his world?), another heath-robinson contraption, self-deception (“things that I try to conceal from myself“) and many more images and themes in this astonishing ‘winding-hole’ (my expression, not the story’s) of a retro-causal waking-dream disguised as a fiction … the story starting with another of this book’s cartographically ‘spiritual’ ley-lines, i.e. this one in three ratcheted segments: the winding corridors of the train, of the forest route, and of the sanitorium – and along this ley-line, our protagonist (as with Tengo in ‘1Q84’) visits his father in that sanatorium. Is the story didactic or purely an absurd wonder of the world? It could be both. That’s its miracle – never really to be sure about anything. HPL’s “vacant abyss overhead”? Cerebral emptiness. Or rigorous metaphysics harvested from dream and fictionatronics? Or simply today’s Todash become eventual white noise “- dull chords disturbing space beyond the limits of audibility.” [I am conscious that this real-time review appears to be growing increasingly like that same cross between intellectually rigorous and imaginatively nonsensical. But I blame or credit the osmosis of this book for that effect. To be ‘like’ something however is not the same as being that thing. And I am, of course, serious in my attempts to portray my journey of reading this book as best I can. Whether this real-time review is of benefit to anyone else but me is not for me to say.] (12/11/11 – another four hours later)]]
Translated by Gio Clairval
Beautifully yet tortuously investigative prose style here tells of a behaviourally defiant couple, a man and woman who trail a bright ‘scarf’ of light behind them, and their house becomes almost transparent with light at the end, leading to ‘a rare rose’. Within the context of this whole book, that ‘rose’ resonates, for me, in more than one direction of meaning. Strangely, in two separate places in the text, “dear” and “dearly” are clearly (in the fog) intended to be ‘clear’ and ‘clearly’, which is “quite annoying no doubt, but a mere coincidence, yes, pure chance,…”
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
“An entirely separate world had appeared, almost as if a playing card had been turned over to reveal its other side.”
…or the turning over of a framed landscape painting or of the very place where I live, thus revealing the Brexit lurking underneath? We all live in the same place, so why bother travelling I often ask my wife. This captivating story of a disorientating sense of direction and of a disarming waking-dream and of visiting, via Thomas Mann’s magic mountain spa, we reach along with the narrator a perfect town, symmetrical and just so, till overturned by a rat and other seeming horrors, then overturned back again, thankfully, by all the human beings seeming to be replaced by the spirits of cats. All small steps, but also now giant leaps of faith. That overturning like a somersault of collectivity — to fulfil the gestalt angles of all literature, and please see my colluding reviews of Haruki Murakami here & here and of Ancient Sorceries here and of The Unconsoled here, and earlier above, of The Ratcatcher and of The Capital of Cat Country.
“I cannot eat anymore; the two feet are left, but if you have a little bag I will eat them later in the day.”
Swift’s Modest Proposal seems to be in my mind today, and Swift himself is mentioned towards the end of this two page story. As a sledgehammer to crack a nut, a hyena from the zoo dresses up, complete with garnered human face, to replace a girl who hates dinner parties in her own honour. Reminds me of Clarice Lispector, too, in keeping with gestalt leaps of imagination from Mexico to Brazil.
My previous review of this author: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-weird-4/
“, where two hills hump double,”
A swashbuckling, lungeing adventure with acrobatics, plus domes on a tower housing a rumoured diamond of giant proportions, one dome turning into a lung (!), not a lunge, plus battles with roguish rivals for that diamond, this adventure and quest being shared by Leiber’s famed Gray Mouser and Fafhrd, in low level Wagnerian machinations on highs levels of earthquakery, and a final leap over two pits, pits as sort of inverted domes or humps? Stone automatons and ensorcelled skeletons, notwithstanding. I used to love this sort of stuff. Sublime scenery, too,
“And now it was cat against cornered rat.”
“Poets can dodge.”
Is it a coincidence that the first section is dated March 21, the SPRING Equinox? Especially as some dark more Autumnal things happen here under the aegis of Mrs Vanderpant. Morticians that gather and a night-watchman of more significance than he first seems. A poet Charles Snell withdraws from the world into a department store, during the era of the bright young things in the twenties, where people jumped from balconies on Wall Street, and he hides among the soft furnishings, only to find others gathered there, too, and he discovers his unrequited love for a girl called Ella. Despite the dark innuendoes, it is told in a flighty, springing fashion, etc, and by imprisoning himself here he has become ironically “free as the mote that dances in the sunbeam!” But…chameleons, things from under stones, and the night watchman smells of Dumont’s sun (literally), and we have echoes of the ceiling frescoes in the Bruno Schulz and the labyrinths of the Ratcatcher. Ladies clambering like spiders from balcony to balcony. And more. Quite a discovery! Another ‘dying fall’, Spring to Fall.
“Ever southward sailed the great iceberg, bearing its lethal winter where the summer sun rode high.”
That smell of the sun again? But we now need to rely on Eibon to tell us that there was more to this massive iceberg than met the eye. This story is remarkably one of my overall book-to-book-gestalt’s Tontines, as one by one we are swallowed by the white worm who brought such an iceberg. Leaving one among us on the outside of the worm to slay it, and that one is Ever suitably become Evagh. A fisher of folk, where some of us still dodge the dreamcatcher net. This story – couched in the unmatchable richness of Clark Ashton Smith prose, overblown, like the worm, but perfectly pitched, too, with, of course, some things mercifully left unnarrated — is a sort of nightmare of false clues and inversions in that Tontine of the path that has led us to this world today long after CAS himself has gone whither. The white worm is now arguably in a “swiftening” of a full Fall’s ghastly gestalt in its own White House. The humming or ‘weird-whispering rune’, included or notwithstanding. The language used, particularly for the slaying of the worm, in this mutantly prophetic story, is completely staggering, “as if from some inexhaustible spring of foulness;”. Yes, SPRING of foulness, as it says in this story. Generally, CAS is truly incomparable, long a favourite of mine, and here is my erstwhile review of the CAS Penguin Classics: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/the-dark-eidolon-and-other-fantasies-clark-ashton-smith/
Translated by Sophie Lewis
“…a twice-yearly dose of one powdered tetravalent pipette pill, a mixture of rice flour and centaur hormones.”
Well, whether that dose created the eponymous wall walker-through, it took a while before he exploited this capability, leading to accumulative repercussions, including, of course, being imprisoned, then escaping! Leaving his signature ‘Werewolf’ nomer wherever he had been. A sort of Dumas hero without an iron mask but with a lorgnette or pince-nez, later spectacles, that need the prop of a nose, the nose that significantly profiled this whole Revamender book earlier. Till the hormone dose wore off… No leap now, only the notes of someone’s guitar “rising” from swollen fingers. Oh, there is the letters of ‘lunge’ of the painter Gen Paul who played such notes, though. A flibbertigibbet I enjoyed. But what has a centaur in common with a werewolf, I suddenly wonder.
“His metamorphosis was so complete that, beardless and bespectacled, he could walk right past his best friends without being recognized…”
“Niggle was a painter.” A painter like Gen Paul, as well as taking a leaf from each book and making it whole. Meanwhile, this work is a revelation for me. This book is full of such revelations, curated by the Revamenders and now created and recreated by each reader, I hope. This is the perfect ending to my own version of this book. It really is. Niggle has a sense of duty to his ‘lame’ neighbour and they both become part and parcel of some holistic place wherein you never seem able to reach its perceived distance, never make the distance your own surroundings, while your ACTUAL surroundings are beset by voices, some voices decrying, some not, some pointing at the ‘nonsense’ of one’s work, others not, some authoritative and petty, some not. The painting as eventual gestalt starts as a single leaf, not a leap, needing a long ladder to reach its gradually growing proportions as a tree. A conceptual art as well as a traditional aesthetic of painting. There was at least one significant tree earlier in this book, but it has gone from my fading mind now. “The autumn came, very wet and windy.” Prince Autumn, now a Fantasy Fall, became a gestalt at the end of my real-time review of the Revamenders’ massive THE WEIRD in 2011. Now Niggle imagines ‘spring’. On his bike. Always a long duty-bound journey to be undertaken. Some of us deem that journey as death? “…went bowling downhill in the spring sunshine.” That Gentle Treatment. Beyond the centaur hormones, yet his ratcheting distances are the previous story’s walls? Birds now building in the conceptual tree. Then, the Revamenders’ “There are lots of things about earth, plants, and trees that he knows and I don’t. This place cannot be left as my private park.” Later a new walking-through-walls or on-water or towards-distances dose of medicine: “A few drops to be taken in water from the Spring, before resting.” Then the shepherd comes. Is that me? Or you? Not a leaper, whatever. Niggle is nought but a “footler”, “Yes, poor little man, he never finished anything.“ I shall now read and enjoy the material in this book that I haven’t yet read which is the material ABOUT the stories not the stories themselves. “‘What did they say?’ / They both laughed.”
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