MONTAG PRESS 2023
My previous reviews of Dr. David Mathew: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/david-mathew/
I recently announced retirement from reviewing whole books, but, for reasons that may become clear later in the comment stream below, I am delighted to promise that, shortly, I shall indeed give sporadic reports upon my reading of this novel with the best title I have seen for a long while!
Having not yet read anything in this book, I am not sure whether these old aipicks of mine will be relevant to it!
I somehow remember I considered that the author’s The Parry and The Lunge novel possessed one of the best opening chapter in any novel.
But this one surely outdoes even that!
I am not going to publicly itemise the plot in real-time as I read this novel. I shall merely mention that the first scenes of a character called Twennyfour in a hot van in the middle of a nameless nowhere with his dual reality of finding a girl called Carey with embedded teeth in her flesh sitting in an isolated derelict dental clinic and of actually travelling in the van with other characters. And there are other intriguing details that linger in the mind. The opening quotations are intriguing, too, and the crisp yet richly rewarding style of the author seems to have reached a mature apotheosis.
I cannot do full justice to any of this here.
At this stage in my life, I feel it is best that I return here in due course when I have finished the whole novel by hopefully reading a chapter a day. I shall then give my verdict on the whole novel, with the caveat that this novel is dedicated to me. I feel thrilled and deeply honoured and, yes, tickled by the words used by the author in this dedication, with my name having earlier been used for a villain in some of his earlier work!
I shall now make a lunging somersault into the future, surrounded by the anticipated delights of reading this novel.
No need for anyone to keep checking back here for the final verdict, because I shall make noises on social media when it is ready.
This book also sports a quote from me which can be found in my real-time review of The Parry and the Lunge.
Running Notebook as aide memoire…
Carey = carious? Claire/ Claire Carey. Children’s chickenpox parties.
Phd in the study of Collectors – a mutual synergy with Hirshberg’s Infinity Dreams here?
Sir Gray with skin condition, violins and teeth, synchronicities of names, plus Cesar Franck, Samuel Beckett. The tractable ease of reading, still thinking this book a potential classic outdoing even my initial expectations. And much more to vanish from my future memory of it?
Read up to page 85 – simply, wow! (generally speaking). Compelling and suspenseful.
In particular, though, beware personal nightmares here.
And please continue to watch the inadvertent mutual-synergy between two quite different books, i.e with The Infinity of Dreams mentioned above:
Mathew’s “Do we have finite space and infinite versions of ourselves to fit into?” Collecting stories or collecting collectors?
And please remember this book’s description of compulsive lying, for our times?
Read up to page 125
Collection of postcards as if from AI ‘wired to machines’ or infinite dream images? ‘
‘Collection”, so-called, of businesses…
“…the concept of an accident was a retrospective construction, a means to find reason in a pattern that appeared unfamiliar in the moment.”
Read up to p149.
This book has ‘Sessions’ of Aide Memoire in some infinity of dreams or coincidences to match my own? E.g.,today-
“I remember a hill. I was trapped under a house in Edlesborough — and I was striding.”
Read up to p177.
Collections, Connections and Coincidences.
“Where’s the Overlap?” … with Obsessions.
Up to p198
Seven angels, ten thumbs, and the Overlap,
I seem to have been catching key things in this book before they became key things in it!
BERENICE by Edgar Allan Poe — To translate the story’s own bit of French — ‘that all her teeth were ideas’.
‘Berenice’ is my own daughter’s name, a woman born nearly fifty years ago. Everyone who reads this Dr David Mathew novel should also read an oblique, probably inadvertent, synergy with the Poe Story.
Think about mentioning my 1993 mainstream-published story SPLINTS in oblique connection with a certain passage on p208. (Full text of my story, posted here in 2004: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/07/splints.html)
Up to p216
Would you start a conversation with someone crying on a train, and would that person’s gender make a difference to your answer?
p232
“‘Do you believe in coincidences?’
‘I believe in grander patterns.’”
Up to p259
Must revise some of these pages before I make my final verdict, such as Claire’s journey to her PHD ‘oral exam’ – is that a double entendre!? Academics and dentists both give oral exams! Viva Voce! Her thoughts on ‘collecting’ and ‘collectors’ and how they relate to my obsessions involved in the gestalt real-time reviewing of great kindred fiction books such as this one. Join my story with its story, A Lewsey farm not a loony one.
cf the collectors and collections in Hirshberg’s Infinity Dreams?
Up to P287
Amidst this tranche de force’s coming together at Lewsey Farm:
“The psychology of collecting. You’re collecting human beings?”
Up to p305.
“The fact that the stories were being shared – and that their authorship could not be validated —“
Characters slipping from novel to novel and an ambition to join the stories together.
Stories as well as storeys in a gestalt anthology building? A cocktail more like a salad, complete with Pilgrims’ Tooth…
“…by the skin of my teeth.”
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/17/mona-dash-let-us-look-elsewhere/
Up to p332
Connections, overlaps, a National Apology Network, conspiracies conspiring with other conspiracies….
Up to p345
“…Anagram City — no letters stayed put; patterns reiterated themselves… […] Collecting is connecting – and connecting is collecting. If you lose Ns you are left with loose ends. You need Ls to make up the space; you need something or something else. You need the L’s – the Else – and the Ns – the ends – to complete the whole. […] Transforming. Being told and re-told; re-created, the idea of the authorship becoming more or less redundant.”
Seminal stuff!
My story starting with the one word sentence ‘Namesake.’ about the ELSE or an Else in the ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ coLLection merely being a naive unwitting preamble to the above, I guess.
Up to p355 (“…as a kind of bookmark in our current chapter.”)
Are these, indeed, “shared delusions” or what I used to call co-vivid dreaming? “…somewhere between place and space – a negative area; a nowhere-fast.” Needing a mass psychic pareidolia: “Seen on high, the patterns of sand and shrub would resemble faces, an ear, parts of the body.”
Up to p380
Up to end
A haddock sewn into curtain and a dead or dying pigeon in a parking bay? Plagiarism or a daemon muse?
The book has its own daemon muse, and if you read its back cover first or last, a lot depends.
I truly sense it is an important literary work, as well as brave new pulp. Much of me doesn’t understand it, but the most important part of me surely does. It seems to have all the ingredients of my gestalt real-time reviewing, tantalisingly beyond reach of even an aide memoire such as the one above!
Coincidences, connections, collections, infinite dreams, academic politics, the daemon muse now revealed by the AI art that has trapped me while reading this book. Was AI art known when it was being written, was it indeed written by an AI, someone ELSE’s PhD, Claire’s precarious PhD? A viva voce in some outer space?
It is an amusing maze of neural or mural meaning. Is amuse the extramural, neutral form of muse? If so what is its opposite, non-muse, un-muse. Or simply word music that I have been reading just as I love to absorb music. Dental Nurse with or without Wound.
I am still so decidedly unwound that this book is dedicated to me. Dedicated by a doctor. A healing process.
Do muses have teeth?