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.
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.
There may be a delay in commencing the review of this book in the wake of my recent Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Aickman projects…
A story 22 luxurious pages long, and long enough to deeply disturb…any longer, would be lethal, and indeed it may still be lethal once I start to understand it properly…
Published in 2021, it contains this sentence…
“I think it was made in Ukraine.”
And, using some of that country’s letters, RIKE is the name of the main protagonist, someone whom the narrator is counselling, but really that narrator is the main protagonist whom the readers slowly become, as we find out we are being counselled not to fully understand what we are being told so as to make it impossible to re-narrate its matter more clearly to others, about the bacon processing plant and their scraps, causing scavenging cats whom we earmark with what I see as peninsulas of gristle clipped from their ears, showing that we have spayed or castrated them, about the Chernobyl trees, about the dance around the fire pit, and tiny folk with there own ears clipped, some of these folk wooden and engrained in our own wooden hearts….as we move along a pipe as a conduit into death. The only thing I want to remember about this work is its music. Other than Rike, all the other characters were stilty or reachy. All skin and grief. I don’t want to become like them. I want to survive atrocity. A case history in man’s cruelty to animal as self. So, I didn’t allow its gestalt to talk to me, by deliberately not reading its last two sentences. Importuned to do so, though, by someone else running their fingers through my hair…
“The core of the dream was a wooden woman, bloody to the elbows,…”