This shocked me, and I am not easily shocked. It shocked me, too, because I even thought I fully grasped what it fetched me against my will; it made a near sex-dead, near dead (full stop) body actually feel something for the first time in ages, the plot’s sexual aspects, its ‘oneiric’ ‘origami’, and the man, I thought somehow was called Keith, until I saw Keith Jarrett mentioned later and I checked back to see the man had no name, with his wife and daughter, the latter with her origami tableaux, say of a damsel fly, if not a wicker one, in parallel with his masseuse and her daughter, and the ‘play-acting’ as his body was folded and refolded, and I even wondered whether I did indeed grasp anything at all, but I do not wish to dwell on it in case I do grasp it fully. A rhombus of four women, two nymphets and two women. But who was whom? The geometry of sensuality’s fleshy-origami, via towel-prim dissection in Rembrandt, even ‘sixteenth century English miniatures’ as mobile phones seem too small for what they do, leading to a direct, almost inner-AI, contact with YouTube domes and Facebooking, a direct contact, via words, of truly felt SEX as an acronym of our in-the-head times while tantalisingly digging into the ever impossible gap between scrotum and thigh. And elsewhere.
I need to read it again, but I won’t.
***
This story can be found in a brand new Brian Howell collection from Salt Publishing entitled THE MAN WHO LOVED KURAS
AND OTHER STORIES.
My previous reviews of Brian Howell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-howell/
My ongoing reviews of single stories by living authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-single-story-toward-a-novel-world/
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