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NO Press 2023
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/adam-golaski/
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.
1
Hushed Will Be All Murmurs
“I’m near stone today.”
Simultaneously reviewing, by chance, a collection of stories by Leonora Carrington HERE, I am not surprised by what I have deemed to be her plot-holes becoming Golaski’s fog-holes here.
Sexual eels, with named characters deaf to swells, tugging at craft or raft towards seaweedy water, and heads swelling till your own head becomes the whole body. If you read Golaski about teenage Annalisa, you will become one of the big-headed people, too. StoneGolaski has a Neologist within it. Murmur, a foreign assonance of Mother. A head now swollen with words that can’t get out in order that you can take them apart to find their meaning.
STONE HEAD
“Maybe the landlord put it here, a crazy lawn ornament,…”
Triggered, not by an elbow, but by a large unexpected head of stone in his garden, a man — awaiting the return of his wife and 13 months old daughter from visiting his wife’s parents — suffers end of world anxiety and compelling suspense (that we share) and visions and nightmares and neighbours morphing, items that I will not spoil by describing them here. I guess it all may be authorially inadvertent but intended by some exterior force that this substantive story seems, in some slight way, to end up being a theme and variations upon Shirley Jackson’s story ‘Louisa, Please Come Home’ that I read and reviewed HERE two days ago! — making both stories seem even more powerful, in synergy as well as entirely separate. Whatever the plagues that now fall from once Heavenly skies.
The Great Blind God Passed Through Us
“What the god wrote became alive, but these things were unintended, half-made…”
And what was left was Kari Kari. As told by young Mary about herself and her equally young cousin Lucy and the connected monsters and nightmares that surrounded them as created by their extended family and by others, (“‘I dare you,’ a boy said to us all, ‘to go past Mr. Floor Brush’s house.’”) if not as created by the author as ‘god’ of this story who begs us not to lose control and to make what we read have a happy ending, I guess. Even their two bracelets that Mary’s Uncle or Lucy’s Father bought for them at the Witches Market were connected halves by the end. The blind god’s own reenactment being stuck halfway within us?
Telling you any of the rest would spoil it.
“Father sat beside my bed, in a chair I was too big for, elbows on his knees, head propped up on his fists.”
Refrigerator-drome
This is a not a “Mexican phantasy” although one is mentioned here, as if knowing I just finished reviewing Leonora Carrington’s stories. And Kitty and Astrid seemed to be mutual ghost-masturbatory versions of Eleanor and Theo in Hill House, also finished reviewing today, who never had their picnic. But you need to get into the fridge to see if yesteryear’s city food is there to provide for such a maroon party. And for those you used to share a city apartment with. A script that ‘overwrites’ Kitty, in short uniquely scanned bursts or plamsets of prose verse, and it has a shock in its last stunza. Shocking and somewhat aggressive towards my normal tastes. But worth it in the end. So much more to say about what happened. But I’ll leave it there, as I am reading it in an ebook not on paper spooling out.
“And, indeed, the script did pulsate.”
nullimmortalis Edit
HOLY GHOST
“Embedded in the beat (sticks on thick glass bottles) is ‘Frère Jacques’ and Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 1,’ or the other way around . . .”
This feels as if it is the most effectively disturbing story I have ever read! Mark my words, I have read some mighty disturbing works over the years and this groove beats them all. Any clue, other than the single quote above, would spoil it. Spin it and see.
WILD DOGS
“I’ve never seen a yellow velvet rope,”
This story uses the word I would use about it: “relentless”. Attritional and free flowing step by step, morph by morph, from snowflakes ashes to mention of our man’s ex called Asha and eventual sighting of her beyond the swirl of levels marked out by red and black curtains to a DJ called White. Via our man flirting with Lala on the way to this club where in its backroom is a picture of woods that becomes as real as the eponymous dogs, not gods, it contains. I feel every bite and cherry, every cigarette and backstep into a groin, thinking back to what Lala said to him earlier and how this story sort of backs itself up forever, as if I am, even now, rewilding it…
“Don’t you want to know what novel I planned to read tonight?”
A Night-piece (“yielding light”)
“Finds a performance by the London Symphony Orchestra of Debussy’s La Mer (can’t help but chuckle at conductor Valery Gergiev’s sweaty comb-over).”
That gives you no idea what this story promises you. A blend of Elizabeth Bowen, Walter de la Mare and Shirley Jackson girls and ghosts plus a bewildered male neighbour, whose refrigerator is also explicitly empty. More than such a blend though; it is Golaski above all.
“All the cupboards in the kitchen are open wide and empty.”
[autobigraphy]
UNFINISHED HOUSES
A little boy called Adam in a rite of passage of reality and dream and/or time-jumping. We pass through vistas of a dog bark-barking, a model castle in the garden toward the perceived relationships of small children and through worlds, inter alia, of Brian Evenson, Leonora Carrington, and Shirley Jackson, tunnelling from a housing estate being built around him to a grown up state already established.. (I note that Marghanita Laski — whom I used to watch talking about things over my head on black and white TV when I was myself a small boy — wrote a novel called LITTLE BOY LOST as well as one of the greatest ever horror stories: THE TOWER.)
OPEN HOUSES
“‘A bug crawling across the hour,’ he said…”
Adam takes a post-snow and nighttime skateboard dare on his own chosen recondite slope near the cemetery, as interspersed with phone conversations with a girl he feels unworthy of — I don’t know, I might misremember, as I was more overtaken by the asthma-transcending ride of a composite of daredevil cliffhangers and an open sided house like a dollshouse rifling dark memories of an event that scores along the ground toward a scary destination. Take the ‘color plate’ out and what do you see behind it, I somehow want to ask.
Goddess of Loneliness
“(The paper the note is written on should be as white as the blossoms were white, and just as we’ve had enough time to read the note, white should fill the screen.)”
Here we have yellow and white, and the moving of Golaski ‘color plates’ and paintings and studio painters like Bacon and Frieske plus verbal refrains like “The print is still visible.” Visions of a Venus shape and a naked female Runner, and our Adam on a rooftop as part of cinematic camera instructions, cut from and cut to, speculating on leaving home as a stowaway on a passing train. With screenplay scripted intercuts of girls and women who importune him, and the colours move, with mittens, from bright yellow to white to ashy grey. I keep my own powder colourless, if not dry.
Woods (Marion)
“…was it that winter that I wore only a navy blue rain coat, found in my grandfather’s garage, the one with the cigarette-scorched hole on the arm?”
I can merely touch the arm of this substantive, nay, great, story, engagingly readable and accessible, but so complex, I also vanish behind its last tree. Of youthful fictions concocted by other older fictions of Adam’s boyhood, dating, girls names interchanged, parallel bus and train journeys, a palimpsest of selves. A girl character given a London accent travelling to Braintree, which actually does not prevent this Braintree being in America, not near where I live in UK. Where I also once used to work for “uninspired corporations flogging the world with mediocre products.” Can I hide, too, behind the trees that created the old paper I once scrawled on? Then vanish? A blast of hunters.
“I’d heard stories about the woods (by whom? By osmosis. Imagined). A story about hunters who shot…”
”Marion rubbed my arm with her hands and said, ‘We’re warm now.’”
Little Stories
“…a sequence of little stories her deputy editor submitted to the journal (anonymously, it should be added;…)”
The Chinese Wall aspirations of ‘Nemonymous’ but she had guessed who it was! This is the mixing and mail-merging, if not crushing together, of these little stories as they affect the story editor’s crush on the deputy editor. A little story that is a speculatively erotic art installation with a Duchamp ready-maid (my sic), here comprising iced lettuce heads, and elbows and knees.
“She lay back on her elbows, uncrossed her legs. […] until her knees sink into her body
The Wind, The Dust
“The doorbell rings. […] She must’ve made a hundred wings.”
A thousand things, even myself as an old man in a closet that convulses dust. The text has even a similar styled script within it on a train. Doris with the wings has a backstory that haunts the place where she is landlady. Adam is renting a floor above another apartment ‘split funny’ between floors. A last balcony as a feature. Geoff is also renting there. You gotta get used to Geoff being there, and his ways, and transformations. Not Kafkaesque. Rain and wind. Lots of phones vibrating. Women as prospects of hesitation. Ends around a scene of non-utilisation of arms, shoulders or elbows to sit upright in bed. For me, every day is such a recurrent dream. Other way-stations in the text… “…all blue, the trees’ blue trunks, shade on shade of pinks—near white, near red, neither true.” — “Way too much beer, but why not? Way too much beer.” — “Procopius’ The Secret History, Empress Theodora’s stone face on the black cover.” But not using the elbows was the darkest moment out of many. I should know, I was made to be there.
Unfinished House
“The book is Procopius’ The Secret History.”
This is the crux. Stone meeting head. And a poem Adam writes or does not write about gods. Adam left by wife, for once, to babysit his own son by means of a baby monitor that he leaves on the front stoep, then visions of an angel in the purple smoky air outside. I didn’t know how important this was above in the previous story that I had already made reference to because at that time I had not yet read this story’s “…but hasn’t the will to do more than prop himself up on his elbows.”
From elbow to rainbow…
[coda]
A Rainbow Summer
“The ark was a perfect cube. Not shaped like a boat. […] Thousands of rooms, like a mansion from Heaven.”
Your large father who can fit your head into his hand as if into a baseball glove. Tells you stories in a room that grows smaller because of his presence in it, stories he embellishes after they ended, like this coda. He helps build boats near the ocean outside, works for the academy, strained marriage with your mother, one day tells you a story of what happens to Noah as embellished by him after the flood… an ending full of quaint animals in your room and a faith in God’s plan?
“You sit up in bed, your back against the headboard.” — as this coda’s “stone seawall”?