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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.
BEGUILED
A letter from a 24 year old woman to her betrothed-by-arrangement of her father, containing details of her brief, presumably innocent affair of the heart with a bookdealer whom her father had employed, and of Latvian bears and lethal ice surfaces… an ambiance and a social class that gradually become clear. And despite or because of having a finely tuned ‘dying fall’ of an ending, it allows the reader to enjoy an uplifting shrug. Parker is the ultimate artist of the disarming and the barely strange. Sometimes more than just barely. And the supreme adept of, yes, the beguiling tease as well as the human whicker.
Ongoing AI art for these stories and previous story collections by this author…
And its continuation link here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1926-2/
AIR CREW
A tale of memories of air plane exploits and pilot rivalries and their women and future lives plus wondrous interventions triggered initially by one of the greatest contextual elbow moments!…
“‘Stephen!’ He yelled, ‘Up to your elbows in babies’ bottles and nappies, I shouldn’t wonder! Playing happy families with that nice little mouse you married. Or should that be whisky bottles?’
There was a wave of laughter. I took hold of his elbow and steered him over to a quiet corner table. Once he was seated I began.”
A wave of laughter, but later “She waved at me and I waved back.”
I reviewed the next story in the context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/rosalie-parker-r-b-russell/, as follows…
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MADRE DE DIOS
The disarming sixty pages of a luxurious hardback book whereby one needs to jump alternate pages, depending on which language version of the story you are reading, English or Portuguese. As if the all too knowing and ominously hooting monkeys in the canopy and understorey of the trees knew they had to keep some of the trees intact, even if the paper for half the pages needed such trees felled. Leap-frogging alternate pages as if the monkeys inversely symbolised the fitful, later druggy, waking and sleeping that Luke eventually suffers after travelling from Manchester to the fell Hell of the Amazonian forest in Peru, to make illicit money from a gold prospecting venture, Luke having travelled along the eponymous river to the trees that the prospectors needed to fell, he being the group’s chemist concerned with mercury and its health and safety. Whether or not the letters he sent his girl friend back home (telling in real-time this very story as gestalt) got through to her in the end, I do see that this book was published in South America!
Certainly a compelling read, a fact which might tell you something…
Memories
An engaging and intermittently shocking discovery of a photo album in an out of the way place, photos stuck in, and sometimes not stuck in. Literally reminding me of other people’s memories now become my own memories during a similar period of time in England. Somehow disarmingly makes sense of an idyllic and blessed nightmare now hatching out fully in real-time. (Click on each photo reproduction if you dare find them.)
See above highlighted link for images and also here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/04/05/the-faders/
Pebble
“—the photograph of the people I think of as my parents;”
…later to be torn in half, making it tantamount to blank.
“It’s irritating, like a small stone in my shoe. Your face is blank.”
The narrator, unless unreliable, makes us believe she is who she is, being importuned and coerced into role-playing games by a master to her as a servant, kept in a cellar, but otherwise treated kindly, through her reportage to us of what he says. Let out once into the garden to collect a single pebble… D & G? The rest of her ‘story’ being verboten. As I don’t want to allow anyone to get away with it, so I’ll leave you there, playing your part as reader
Bipolarity
This is a moving portrait of the woman manic depressive narrator, venturing on a high into her favourite meadow walk and overstaying by fulfilling some sort of down-played epiphany with a man who plays a flute like Pan, I assume, and his woman companion who appear and seem to endanger the narrator’s adopted vixen and her cubs, until our heroine narrator rescues herself to return to her worried husband. The only way to cure bipolarity is by under-dramatising things by cloaking them in the narrative of deadpan words? Giving us no point to hang on to? Quite a relief.
School Trip
A bullied neuro-diverse schoolgirl with puppy fat on a coach trip with her peers bemoaning their confiscated mobiles and two equally well-characterised teachers. To a museum of objects stemming from folk horror, I guess, whence our heroine grows sleeker and more confident. That’s simply it, folks. I admire the plain narrative cheek. And equally the undercurrents hidden in plain sight.
Black Shadow
“…sometimes it snowed in April, the frost blackening the swelling buds on the pear tree in the garden, the glory of the daffodils hidden in a drift of white.”
A poignant pandemic tale of a woman and the black dog she found on the snowy moors near where she lived, and the sometimes ghostly synergy with herself it provided. Creatively naive and natural.
Dream Fox
This is a very strong story, one with a ‘blow’ on little Alison’s cheek leaving a bruise after a ‘nudge on her farther’s arm’, making for me a hidden elbow moment, and preternaturally fulfilling the AI art already produced at above link’s continuation link for earlier stories, and, here, now, there is another strutting fox dog or Reynard, another bruise, another vixen and her cubs and Alison (Alice?) fulfilling her ironically wonderland or Swiftian dream with the foxes. Nature means a lamb killed now and again when push came to shove but a rabbit killed more often, and men that still hunt foxes with hounds, despite the law. A magnificent work that should be as seminal as earlier such great literature for adult children.
Or child-like adults!
Endgame
“I’ve always made a point of being in control and not at the mercy of strong feelings or stray thoughts,…”
A deeply charged but somehow gentle portrait of a boy whose Proustian memories of his mother be-ghost him now.
Even though she is dead and he is balding, she still lives for him.
I felt highly in tune with this work. Its past, too, being my own past of comics and grey, mainly switched-off TVs.
Idyllic.
But then I see the last paragraph ends with question mark – that takes me full circle to the story’s title?
All Talk
“I opened the top drawer of his desk. Inside lay a scrap of dirty black cotton fabric, old, torn. I picked it up and looked at it for a while, then put it back in the drawer.”
This is a gently compelling story told by a business woman who somehow fancies as well as mothers one of her male employees, a successful salesman who confides in her about his seemingly time-travelling double life away from his own wife and children…and his mixed emotions. One that ends with references to the mysterious photos I illustrated ‘Memories’ with. People who were photographed but never existed?
Tremor
The charming tale of a woman with an ominous bodily tremor that hardly allows her to thread a needle and her nearby friend, a widower, as they come closer while he builds, he claims, a Time Machine…all with images of places and yearnings entramelled together by her stitching designs.
First reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/06/infra-noir-2020/#comment-22419
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Home Comforts
This story of rain, shopping in town, today’s endemic face masks the need for which due soon to be lifted and the freshening of a woman ‘s mid-life life without such masks, face upturned to the rain, but which woman is which who has need the most for our cuddly stuffing and stiff be-gins and tonic?
The most disarming nonsense that I have ever read, perfectly pitched,…
The Decision
“How to second guess the future? There is quiet knowing laughter in every room.”
Eventually a story more chilling than the winter it depicts. Did I read about ‘blood and slime’ or did I dream it? Superficially, a gentle story of a house in the countryside you feel in your memory bones, the stalking laughter as a woman decides and decides again about a man who lives in the area with an ailing father and whether she should stay or go to the city,
And a snowy watershed destiny only cunning readers will feel.
Turbulence
A tale told within a frame story of air turbulence on a scheduled flight, about unrequited love during the 80s in Soviet Russia and its neighbouring Finland, takes a new meaning when one considers the Icarus elements of a St Michael statue, with wings or without. From such turbulence to a musical ‘dying fall’ regarding why the love had to remain unrequited. Ironic the air was noisy not quiet with wings through the human condition’s own turbulence… bodily or spiritual.
(Please see my triggered images for this tale.)
“The Walled Garden: A Fable”
Blackbirds outwit rats to keep their territory. Feels as if written neatly by a schoolteacher for her pupils to mark.
Homecoming
This story came home to me actually before it actually came home to me. The surface story, notwithstanding. I enjoyed that, too – about the agoraphobic woman who worked from home and let her garden go, and became irritated at the kids next door playing outside, and their finding the bracelet with trinket elephants that the woman had previously lost, and the beloved wife who was ever coming home to her. Till she almost did. Or actually did. But had she forgotten what the elephants always remembered for her? About who she actually was?
Power of the Garden
“The refugees from Sudan in the flat below mine, who have asked if I would like to sit in their garden, make noisy love when they think I’m asleep.”
A substantive work as portrait of an old lady’s backstory with a male ‘guru’, now told to us by herself during her lonely endgame of a life, told us in preparation for telling her Sudanese neighbours. No review can do justice to this sincere and compellingly gratuitous account. It feels real, because nobody could surely have thought of such a scenario as possibly making an effective fiction work. A paradox. Because, somehow, it does.
Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences: Introduction by Mary Belgrove
An ingenious mock (?) introduction to a vanity press publication arranged by a lottery-rich and ailing lady showcasing other people’s experiences of the paranormal and life after death, none of which she had yet experienced for herself. Think about it! (see my continuing A.I. collage here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1926-2/)
There follow reports of these contextualised experiences in the ‘stories’ below…
Country House Party
A snowbound ghost story with the promise of a new L.P. Hartley where modern aristocracy including a Government minister have a weekend stay-over gathering, involving a drunken tableau with ‘slaves’, and is it possible to twist the surface didactic story told by the unreliable lady narrator into a different non-didactic one that she had masked having been disturbed by a painting outside her room?
There is no smoke without fire, I say.
Stones and Bones
“He raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Do you think I could ask their gods for a favour?”
“‘Make me a cup of tea, Cynth. I’m too comfortable to move.’
‘What did your last slave die of?’ I said, going into the kitchen.”
A break in Dumfries and Galloway, a man crippled by a car accident that was his fault together with his wife, involving guilt, fear of repercussions, praying to the contents of an ancient cairn – an ominous outcome if also a fruitful one. A straightforward supernatural tale, but I ever think there is more to these stories. Unknown and undeclared forces to the reader as well as even to the author, I often assume.
Deep Roots
This story itself has deep roots, another in a pattern of characters seeking a ‘confessional’ in the author and telling their story to exorcise it. I remain aghast at the blatant disconnections of a travelling salesman and installer of lighting countrywide and giant mushrooms attacking a warehouse where he had installed lighting and his wife back home receiving anonymous phone calls and his estranged father in a care home. Then I thought of the title connecting them! Don’t go there.
see my continuing connected A.I. collage here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1926-2/
The Dating Game
This time the ‘unreliable’ narrator tells of his own backstory to a possibly ‘unreliable’ confessional and of the beautiful woman from Slovakia he met through a Dating Agency on-line, an eventual unrequitedness and sloughing off of realities into cruel visions, gratuitous or not. One wonders at the purpose of some of these so-called confessionals. And I continue to sense things going on in the undercurrents that no reader, perhaps not even the author, dares even refer to, let alone uncover.
Arguable circular levels here: insulated source author – projection of an author as reliable sub-source but suspected to be unreliable – main narrator as confessional – sub-narrator as the one confessing – reader or reviewer –
View from a Tower
A most poignant story of a benefit claimant in our own times daring to fall in love with another man’s wife and experiencing the past’s hard but idyllic countryside life of his Nan as some alternate world provided by dream where his love affair is requited — not, as it is in our world, tragically unrequited.
Brighton Byways
“Your readers will have to see if they can find any meaning in it.”
And I did. But not the expected meaning.
Meantime, I enjoyed the atmosphere of the eponymous byways as well as having memories evoked of my listening to Radio Luxembourg on my transistor, but I never had a sister.
Summer Holiday
This further example of an attempted confessed exorcism tells of a camping holiday of four students overtaken by fog and mysterious disappearances, a work that will linger with me. Continue to worry me, no, worry AT me. If I tell you more, it would spoil it. I am beginning to be more and more attuned to this series of examples of a genre that I shall call worry-stories. Or the long linger of Short Worries?
The Back Parlour
“…dared each other to linger longer.”
A farm overtaken by a reservoir and the sweet ghostly voice does not follow to the new farm they buy nearby with the compensation money … but it lingers like a worry, despite its amenability of an accepted childhood with it regular hauntings in the now demolished back parlour, A worry for self or a worry for her? This list grows of thus worried people in this book, and their perhaps slanted reportages.
The Man In The Park
“Yesu has been telling me some stories. ”
The series of authorial ‘episodes’ of the worry-story has ended this remarkably disarming book with the ninth one — a transcending reportage that needs to be read cold, without my prior intervention here – other than to point to what I wrote above to a larger (if still tiny!) Twitter audience for such literary concerns.
I’ll end the whole review by reminding you that collaged AI images to accompany its gestalt remain in an uncommitted place called elsewhere.