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.
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.
The Frost Crabs of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche — Michael Uhall
This is an apotheosis of an apotheosis of Jules Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues’ and of Thomas Mann’s under-the-sea passages HERE from ‘Dr Faustus’ which perhaps also as the whole novel has relevance, and, dare I say, of my own Giant Drill’s Journey through the universal oceans of an empty Earth to whatever lies Lovecraftianly at its Centre in ‘Nemonymous Night’, but additionally there is much more that subsumes such cumulative apotheoses of previous books, and becomes its own utter uniqueness as the amazingly contraptive submersible that I might call Hull Immortalis instead of Null Immortalis — a steady-state resurrection derived from the eponymous collaboration implied in the title of this mighty Uhall work.
Coming out of semi-retirement, I could not resist reading and reviewing this work, having done so before for Michael Uhall’s fiction works in ‘Vastarien’. And, indeed, we have here presented an element of themes embodying Ligottian Anti-Natalism / felo-de-se coupled with a transcending of any previous search for a historic super-race by ethnic cleansing, all by means of this vision of crabs bingeing on whale meat in some cross between a Dionysus Cryology Station and a ‘biting sea’ that ‘ate and ate’. Swiftian lemmings as creatures that re-create themselves by acting the way they did.
The plot involves Maximilian in a voyage of adventure between Boston and Bremen, and eventually, after shipwreck, he meets Nietzsche and the latter’s living moustache that eventually features as manifold crabs on the upper lip of a god-like figure. The sun as a “grand and shining nihil, this bright zero that pulsed above and traversed the sky”, in Faustian tune with Sunnemo the Core in ‘Nemonymous Night’.
This Uhall is a work of a Mad Scientist’s Philosophy couched in a truly overwhelming (in a good way) tour-de-force of prose. The words and syntax are literally staggering, and I could not resist reading the sixty pages in one sitting, instead of what I intended as a section-by-section reading and review. It needs broadly absorbing in one passion of the reading impulse as a maw or abyss or black hole of a circle back to the Stillwater where the reader first began. Nothing I can further say or quote from it can do justice to it. It just is, and will be. Full of learning, knowledge and visionary instinct. Madness as sanity, and vice versa.
“The sea is something no one ever was.”
***
Yesterday, before reading this work, someone suggested I photograph a certain ornament in my house, the oldest object left in my possession from when I started marital life in 1970. This was intended for the Facebook Group I started a few days ago entitled ‘Artistic Photos of Elbows and Elbow Shapes’! Madness and sanity come in various shapes, not only circular as this book is! (My photos are shown on the same page as linked above for the ‘Dr Faustus’ excerpts.)