The Idyll Is Over – Jonathan Wood
2020
My previous reviews of Jonathan Wood: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-new-fate-by-jonathan-wood/ & https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jonathan-wood/
And of ZAGAVA the publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/zagava/
When I read this publication, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Twelve, tall, narrow, textured, rough-edged, hand-stitched pages, between two thicker pages as covers. It as if it is a tract that will surely outlast any book collection diversified when their owner is dead, died after an unproductive cough, collectible by being flattened at the bottom of an oubliette craftily slanted beyond sight only to be rediscovered when all of us who read it and have read this review of it are dead, too. And this work is a fine Jonathan Wood stylish exercise in a family of characters who may not now exist because they are in social isolation elsewhere acting as talking heads on FaceTime! Or it is a tract about someone dying — expiring Covidually while it is being written, co-sharing with his family of real or imagined characters and their plus-ones, some of whom are lurking in cupboards … cupboards layered or lined with real or imagined copies of this very tract, I wonder. My copy has its mentioned marginalia in it, now, so beware! And this, momentously, is the first work I have reviewed where I need not extrapolate upon its preternatural connections with the pandemic — because it is evidentially written after the pandemic happened, not before!