1975
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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.
HUEBLER
“It was his intention, he declared, to ‘photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive.’.”
There seems something appropriately resonant, in hindsight, with my chance review yesterday HERE of PIERRE MENARD, AUTHOR OF THE QUIXOTE by Jorge Luis Borges. Who rebel? Hu reactionary? This is an intriguing series of separate descriptions of the 23 numbered types of human being that make up the who-we-all-are and the who-YOU-are at the very end of it all. The ‘Zynopic’ me, the ‘STILL LIFE’, the synchronous maniac effected by every cause, and more, and less. But I also recognised myself, somewhat, in Murray Bail’s no. 1: the one who wants to avoid anonymity, to build a legacy by inventing words and ‘planting’ them in various places so that they end up in a prestigious dictionary, such as I have already done with the word ‘nemonymous’! And in no. 7: ‘At least one person who thinks words are as concrete as objects’. And, most of all, in no. 15: “At least one person who is convinced his or her experiences would make an interesting nov—“ that is a descriptive section comprising two blank pages!
BEWARE SPOILERS BELOW…
LIFE OF THE PARTY
A story that watches us read it but not having even read it itself. A man in a treehouse, an absent party as it were, has invited guests to a barbecue leaving all the ingredients there to be prepared and consumed, and then watching as they made their own party without him. I was particularly intrigued by a neighbour called Zelda, who I don’t think was at the party, who seemed to only do things beginning with z, like always calling nought or nothing with the word zero. Cf Zymurgy, Zythm, Zynopic and Zyvatiate in ‘Huebler’.
ZOELLNER’S DEFINITION
“Z: Zeal, Zeller and Zouch.”
This has the definition, body part by body part and then personalised to Zoellner, of one man whatever the arbitrariness of his name. Seems akin to photographing them all in ‘Huebler’ and the tree-house observer as conductor in the ‘Life of the PARTy’…
Also, all of these seem to resonate with THE CONDUCTOR (here) about an hour ago, by chance! At least, Bail has the courtesy to mention ‘elbow’ in the Zoellner!
THE DROVER’S WIFE
“; and they drive you mad.”
Australian bush flies, that is? So why are they not in the painted portrait that the dentist narrator by chance sees of his wife Hazel who left him after a curt message on butcher’s paper, now, based on the evidence of this painting, shacked up with a drover whom they once met in the obliquely vast vision of the bush, a man who had presumably painted it with a decipherable signature. I also don’t know why I read this story out of the book,’s order, a sort of accident or a ‘silly streak’ like Hazel’s, a streak that the narrator describes to me in the hindsight exemplified in the text of her having such a silly streak, leaving the dentist with her own children, too. So much truth to be deduced from such deductions, a truth that only fiction can convey as fiction within fiction. A masterpiece of a portrait. And, so, what drove her to leave? Dentists are not butchers, after all.
PORTRAIT OF ELECTRICITY
“every scrap of evidence plays its part . . . piecing together the whole.” (Sic)
A guide takes people round a museum dedicated to all the residua of a genius who remains nemonymous to the readers — an exhibition of physical memorabilia towards an understanding that I shall call ‘gestalt’, residua such as his empty chair, a piece of carpet from under his desk as worn away by his feet’s scraping, his fingernail, a bus ticket crumpled where he threw it (and to find the bus number would be like me finding a meaningful typo in a book I guess!), his blotter, even his ordure in turd shape to show his life-force, the hand-mirror into which he was the last person to look (a situation to be preserved at all cost!), and the mark that his shadow left on the wall (the features of his body mass including his “ELBOW”, and indeed ‘elbow(s)’ or ‘elbowed’ are mentioned at least five times in this relatively short text!)
The text seemed to take a surprise turn towards the end, thus reducing the museum subject’s nemonymity by showing us the black phone where his personality travelled through “electrical copper”, this happening very soon after the otherwise neutral point of view suddenly became the first person plural. We are all him? Even the ‘joker’ among the crowd. And the guide tried to imitate his voice!
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THE SILENCE
From the voice via electricity immediately above, to an incrementally reductive voice in Joe Tapp, as if the rather staccato prose is itself finally grinding to halt in the ground of desert around Joe’s camp of tent, freezer etc., where he traps rabbits (“Nothing to confuse his ears.”) ready for hearing the intermittently recurrent sound of Treloar’s truck growing louder to collect this dead meat, and his recurrently curt conversation with Joe, until Joe hides from Treloar instead of the latter’s staccato voice jumping across to him without electricity, especially since Joe no longer has any voice at all. Which begs the question: what is it that powers the freezer?!
HEALING
A Healing seems to be a type of motorbike in the long ago, but Google disagrees, it seems, maybe they’ve not heard of it nor of someone called “Boardman (that rings a bell)” who heals Hedley and his precocious 14 year old sister Glenys when riding Hedley’s Elliott, a motorbike Hedley had customised to the point of speedy attenuation, with his sister on the handlebars, or rescued, rather, by Boardman from the actual NEED to be healed, with Boardman coming alongside on his Healing and stabilising the situation and hopefully bailing them out before the Elliott crashed….
A meaningless tranche of life in a deviously flat Adelaide, with right out of my reviewing obsessive playbook a number of a street in that place, 1839 Magill Road, being the same year, 1839, that the Elliott was invented! Means something!
Ah, found it!
https://cybermotorcycle.com/marques/anz/healing.htm
PARADISE
I felt somehow as if I were somehow exulting in exaltation when reading about this bus driver Merv, with a wife called Enid, and who made bespoke stops for passengers, and the story’s title is written on his bus as if its final fare stage, until diverted, unless I’m mistaken, by a crash with a green bread van, and now he has a new job at the top of a building near God, with new signs upon the sky itself, signs as fate stages for which he is responsible, RAIN or FINE. Unless the phone rings to tell me I am indeed mistaken and it means something quite different!
ORE
“I’d say it was a moot point whether to buy a copper share now, or a ton of the metal itself.”
There is ever an ‘or’, this man called Wes with “large wrist knuckles” who gets obsessed body and mind (to the detriment of his marriage) with commodity dealings in the 1960s. (But what was “Mt Isa”, then?) Yes, his body AND mind, not OR. Sugar rush (using as much sugar as possible and even hoping their delivery lorries had leaks so that sugar could sift out like sand or time), and so his teeth needed filling, gold fillings. Then gold dealing, and other metal exchange numbers and a nightmare of these being a dealing in words that just mean nothing at all, so you might as well LIVE rather than READ about life? Not either/or, though, I say. You can do both… well, at least until you get too old for life, of course, and then invaluable reading about life is all that is left to me. Reading was what I first invested in fully in the 1960s, I guess.
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HOME OWNERSHIP
“A kind of weariness grew as the house brooded, which was not obvious before. More and more it drooped.”
We experience with some power the growth of how a house can own someone who couldn’t eventually care less about it, seeing it from when it was built in the 1930s as part of an estate in Brisbane, this one belonging to Parker and his wife till now in the 1970s, from the second world war to Viet Nam; his wife who was named after her cacti on the day Poland was invaded, I infer, was impregnated by a recurrent salesman of his pens, and she soon dies. Parker himself wears away quicker than the house, but they reach some catharsis when they are together the single house with poignant evocations of wear and tear, perhaps decay, gutters like eyelids or frowns, somehow into a symbiosis of just the house left to die alone…
“It was that loose downpipe, the skinny elbow…”
This is mine:
CUL-DE-SAC (UNCOMPLETED)
“And like any topographer worth his salt he has worn elbows. When Biv bends his arms it is not a sharp angle, more a soft curve. He has measured the wear with set squares.”
And, like Biv, I use a Staedtler pencil, and my own set square to triangulate — along with other readers — stories, especially this story that begs for such treatment, a tangent with greatness, about perspective, a numbered tranche of a quest for the cul-de-sac as ironically set in motion by Biv’s chief (or God?) who has the last laugh of buried shadow beyond the end of this work, I guess. I loved the optician who observes him, also a character not in this work called Grey whose daughter is watched undressing by Biv, in all manner of her angles and breasts, and people who serve time as statues (in recent times dangerous activity), pareidolia of dirty clouds or ‘patches sewn on his elbows’, the purity of the right angle as a sort of number 42 or holy grail, and to match the ‘electricity of copper wires’ earlier in this book we have ‘a Library of Applied Noise.’ And Parker’s house above as protuberance on country as the constant base for such changing protuberances. Biv, like all of us eventually, becomes ‘pathetic’, if not bathetic. Bi-vocal to fox the optician or de Chirico? Still marking things out like upon this work with my pencil till the very end.
“…elbows were tired.”
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THE PARTITIONS
“…women, elbowing like Corrumbin parrots….”
“The world consists of inter-reacting particles, the everchanging pattern…”
A perfect story for me, confirming this book — and my public reviews over the last year or so — in the elbow-trigger obsession (there is another handful of separate ‘elbows’ in this story to add to those already spotted in this book!)
And also my belief is reaffirmed in the reviewing triangulations (here in this story ‘hypotenuse’ and ‘right angle’ are mentioned in keeping with above Cul-de-Sac) and the slowly real-time accruals toward what I call the literary gestalt. And the sort of slow hare-and-tortoise (“part shuffle”) racing of these peopled partitions dovetails with my recent publicly expressed obsession in literature with a particular Zeno Paradox.
The named Lilliputian characters are colourfully conjured, as are the shenanigans, sexual or otherwise, that went on in office partitions before the later arrival of open plan offices.
I must now thank Rhys Hughes for recommending this book to me. That young lad knows what he is about!
“Cubicles within cubicles, partitions interlocking forming additional cubicles, dead ends, apparently endless patterns of partitions.”
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
This is the book’s effective coda, where words and their letter partitions and semantic cubicles are considered head-on, as we are told the story of Kathy Pridham in Karachi and her absorption into a new way of life when in relationship with the foreign country’s notable painter in that city. Dealing with coercion by that artist and her isolation from the other white people in that city. But the meaning was different if you just read the words and forgot the false fable and its moral that the words purported to impart.
SPOILER …
When I wrote the previous review above about partitions, I had then not yet read this story, and I had no idea this was going to happen, so I was somewhat shocked but fulfilled that its closing summation, when back in London, contained these w,o,r,d,s — “…the woman with elbows on the table is Kathy Pridham.”
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