My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jayaprakash-satyamurthy/
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.
Shelter From The Storm
Incredible, this story sort of did to me what the events in it did to the press-ganged narrator in it, an autorickshaw of words and drinking, and quarky conversations, even talk of peeing at a corner of a street where someone once peed before with a plaque to prove it! (I sadly pee all over the place these days. Not a youthful storm but bowed, sheltered dribbles).
Lab Coats
“I started to cohere.”
Exquisite, as this story helps me cohere, too, toward gestalt — from an equally exquisite ‘ramshackle’ near the sea of this resort. One with playing-cards like the Apocryphan, I guess. I will not taint my review with AI art but the three girls in shining lab coats are begging for it. As is ‘history shrugging’ its cohering, careering pasts.
The next story I read in April 2019 when it appeared in the wondrous VASTARIEN, my review of it as follows….
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BURGER SHOP by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
“hijabm […] skullcap […] especially the om and the swasthik.”
A meditation group (or a chanting mob with premeditated halal cuts?) meets in various places, here their latest venue in this flash fiction of a flash-fried, typo-headed blurb of a burger shop, and I may have misinterpreted it but it keeps me thinking that this world is full of thinking of things and misinterpreting them according to some tunnel vision of faith (here multifaith as real-time gestalt?), with other deliberate typos meaningful in hindsight or meaningless with synchronicities of social-media flashmobs kickstarted and crowd funded.
The Appearances
“A world that’s in crisis has no time for minor anomalies.”
Inexplicable objects inexplicably keep appearing on the café tables when the key-holding characters open up for the day. They consign them to a warehouse. It is as if the brief story is miraculously distilled — by an accumulating gestalt power — into its own ending, amid an otherwise dystopic world outside it .
Place to Dwell
“You die feeling very old and wasted.”
Ending with a ‘find your own path to adventure’ narrative game as jazzy coda, this is a bodacious friend of a story, in an unexpectedly tasteful lightsome literally well-placed hotel (or artful hospice?) where viewpoints share with viewpoints a certain ménage à ‘think of a number in French’.
Loved it. Need to go there today!
Vox Populi
“Pursuing them, perhaps I too was eluding my own stalkers.”
This is the apotheosis of words in preference to AI Art, the ultimate Satyamurthy, the clinging voice of prose, a two-way filter. Inimitable and irreplicable by any other member of mankind or machine, amidst dreamers and realists, poor people and rich, oriental and occidental.
The Smallest Of Things
“- former resistance fighters, I should say. We do not resist much now.”
I think I know what it must be like to save a fish and drown a child, yet I know not the meaning of ‘hecatomb’ without looking it up. A place where the dead get lost? I must bury my ignorance, I guess.
Alpha And Iota
A surgically simple truth-as-fiction classic of self as separate Proustian selves, digressing on family estrangements, would-be sexual interactions as miasma, modern social tensions, even strumming the ‘nemo’.
“The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.” – John Fowles (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’ 1964)
Turn And Turn Again
“…standing elbow to elbow” with words, this is a literally breathtaking, period-less tranche of prose in a genuinely accessible modernistic Four Quartets sentence of life, of one’s youth and its trials and tributaries and, indeed, temptations – on a day that I surreptitiously discover is the author’s much later 46th birthday, part of which sentence at least inadvertently reminds me of a crucial section of my own only published novel…
My own worst dream or nightmare is quite mild. I worked hard to gain the qualifications for University entrance—much to the pride of my working-class parents whose son was beginning to embark on something quite beyond their understanding or ambition. Such humility prevailed in those days—forty years ago. People like me simply didn’t go to University. Once there, I ended up doing reasonably well, despite going through a potentially bad middle period during the three-year course when I began to sleep long into the mornings, skipped lectures/ seminars/tutorials—and only managed (with the help of my then future wife) to salvage the situation by the skin of my teeth. Upon this bare survival of academic growth I managed to consolidate my studies towards the endgame of Final Exams. In my worst nightmare, by contrast, I do not manage to salvage the situation: a long- term recurring dream where I didn’t bother to look at the various noticeboards to establish what essays I should be writing for the course seminars etc.—whilst everybody in authority seemed to remain silent, failing to alert me to my missing gaps. I sat back and occasionally wondered how easy it was to keep up at University, together with experiencing a nagging doubt that things were slipping away from me. A recurring dream, a recurring denial,… — Nemonymous Night (2011)
A Vision Of Balance
“I shelter in shadow…”
Taping things from the TV and wireless like my own now 52 year old son once did in in the 1980s/90s? Hmmm. Including hiss and static.
Now the old king finally meets his hiss.
Coil in Balance, I know of such things even if nobody doesn’t think I do! They’ll hiss off with me.
***
Under Hollowed Skies We Watch ~a creation myth~
“…those branching corridors changing form from turn to turn passage to passage.”
“…and shelter with Theni”
Theni is Thine, these mystic words of a youthful ‘linked groupage ’ puvulating within my hissing brain toward the final gestalt.
***
Murder Tongue
“merging in a gestalt of gibberish”
This is the final short work in — it has to be pointed out — a relatively short book (thankfully the optimal size for me to manage in my ailing days) — and it is a very powerful work indeed to finish off the book, and I empathise with the murder tongue fully. Unmissable. Always so.
The book’s gestalt still percolates and hisses in the cookpot of my brain. Sorry, for personalising it so much. Momentous shelter for hopefully more than a moment