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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.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Killing Commendatore - Murakami

Killing Commendatore – Haruki Murakami

December 25, 2019

C09AD2D4-E311-429B-8A87-6685A0371682

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My previous reviews of this author: here and here.
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki MurakamiIn "Haruki murakami"

Killing Commendatore or Knight CommandersIn "Haruki murakami"

By Climate and TrumpateWith 1 comment

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28 thoughts on “Killing Commendatore – Haruki Murakami”

nullimmortalis January 1, 2020 at 2:43 pm Edit

PART 1
THE IDEA MADE VISIBLE
PROLOGUE
Cross referenced with my review entry twenty minutes ago about ‘Man on the Ceiling’ here https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/man-on-the-ceiling-melanie-tem-and-steve-rasnic-tem/#comment-17765 with a photo of some of this prologue’s text about a penguin charm.,,

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nullimmortalis January 1, 2020 at 3:15 pm Edit

1
IF THE SURFACE IS FOGGED UP
The narrator is a 36 year old painter who gives up his serious abstract work for paid portraiture, only needing a few snapshots and an interview about a subject’s life, no protracted sitting. Fascinating house on top of a mountain, a house split by endemic weather fronts. Under patches of clouds. A canvas is a sort of ceiling, I wonder? He has a marital separation of nine months from his wife, although when they separated they thought it was forever. During that period, he has methodical sexual affairs as business like as his portraits, I guess. The women seem just as methodical until the affairs run their course. This has just scratched the fogged surface in a matter of a mere ten pages. There are over 670 pages in the book, you see. In fact we learn a lot more in these ten pages than what I have intimated above.

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nullimmortalis January 2, 2020 at 3:46 pm Edit

2
THEY MIGHT ALL GO TO THE MOON

“What I saw there was an exhausted thirty-six-year-old man in a shabby paint spattered sweater.”
After reading that, I wondered whether the spattering on the pages’ edge was not blood as I originally assumed.

In this chapter, I counted three subtle references to the moon, excluding the chapter’s title. The chapter tells, in its own business-like, yet engaging, way, of the backstory of the marital separation. And his taking his decrepit car over much of Japan, doing makeshift pencil sketches of people, but then returns to Tokyo, to take up portrait painting seriously again. Medelssohn’s Octet. ‘Way back when’ as refrain. Scrape of worn-out wipers. Hypnotised me.
His wife, by the way, when he first met her reminded him of his twelve year old sister who had died. It was the eyes.

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nullimmortalis January 3, 2020 at 7:33 pm Edit

I shall no longer itemise the plot developments, but only specific things that strike me…
3
JUST A PHYSICAL REFLECTION
“Don’t want you ending up like THE SHINING.”
…like the physical reflection in a mirror. Or the real self. Clinging to a piece of wood to prevent drowning.
Living in the mountain house he is offered that once housed a painter, Amada, now in care elsewhere. elderly and demented, someone who once painted the book’s eponymous painting, I guess. The painting that I, and perhaps I alone, wonder whether it is trying to get out of the floating book by splashing through the wood’s sliced paper pages!

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nullimmortalis January 4, 2020 at 6:57 pm Edit

4
FROM A DISTANCE, MOST THINGS LOOK BEAUTIFUL
“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievable bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings.”
I have learnt, after eleven years of the gestalt real-time reviewing process, to read books and their palimpsest of timelines with those thoughts in mind’s eye. Timelines, distant and near. Characters old and young, sometimes the same character viewing himself when younger or someone much older who becomes a new character to him in mind’s eye or researched. Both of them painters. An ancient era painted. The house opposite queried, but inferred potential hindsight might tell us about matters yet to be imparted. Not worrying what comes next until reaching what comes next. From pre-internet to preterite internet. Not that the latter has yet become relevant — if it ever does!

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nullimmortalis January 5, 2020 at 7:41 am Edit

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nullimmortalis January 5, 2020 at 8:59 am Edit

5
HE HAS STOPPED BREATHING . . . HIS LIMBS ARE COLD
“It was by total coincidence that I discovered the painting by Tomohiko Amada, the one with the unusual title, ‘Killing Commendatore’.”
I have read this chapter since posting the above Facebook post. Painted by a now memory-less nonagenarian specialising in ancient Japanese art against more modernistic work, guarded, as it were, by a gray horned owl in the attic, depicting a long-faced man looking through a manhole cover at the bloody killing of a ‘knight commander’ in a duel by a thrusting Don Juan figure (or at least someone like the POTUS who thought he was such a figure?) — set against the past of famous Amada’s life in Vienna, during the second world war, with an armada of a land army in occupation?
The only Amada painting in the house – but why that painting alone? Revealed as if peeling bandages off it, after it is fetched by our narrator from the attic. A painting with mixed effects. Intriguing, consuming, even alarming for today’s reader. As if, like the narrator with the painting he has just discovered, the book is meant just for ME!
Modernities in interface with ancient eras.
“Tomahiko Amada had ‘adapted’ the world of Mozart’s opera into the Asuka period.”

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Pingback: Killing Commendatore or Knight Commanders | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Edit
nullimmortalis January 5, 2020 at 11:58 am Edit
MY TWITTER POST:
https://twitter.com/df_lewis/status/1213789821602291712?s=21

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nullimmortalis January 6, 2020 at 8:23 am Edit

“And in the end he transformed into an ominous statue that appeared to Don Giovanni and took him down to hell.”

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nullimmortalis January 6, 2020 at 8:51 am Edit

6
AT THIS POINT HE’S A FACELESS CLIENT

“hit man”
“Just like a reader might carefully copy down in a notebook each word and phrase he liked in a book.” – seeking “intent” in the painting as well as the book, I guess.
Also he feels under ‘surveillance’ himself as a client seeks his last portrait, with proper sitting, tête-à-tête, it seems. More as a business expense than a work of art? But I must stop this resumption of summarising the plot, as I go through in real-time, as the world potentially erupts around me, by climate and trumpate.

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- nullimmortalis January 6, 2020 at 11:03 am Edit
  
  https://nemonymous.livejournal.com/332939.html
  All The Words We Know by DF Lewis
  
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nullimmortalis January 6, 2020 at 4:19 pm Edit

7
FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, IT’S AN EASY NAME TO REMEMBER
Why that is so, and who the potential portrait painting sitter is, I’ll leave you to discover. Other than that he has ears like woodland mushrooms. Much of interest about the study of the face itself, any face, and the work of a portrait painter and the specifications discussed for this particular project. The possible blending of writer and painter. And the potential sitter’s white concrete house viewable across the valley like a liner. Yes, white house, as the crow flies.
I am currently watching a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni on YouTube. Been some years since I experienced it.

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nullimmortalis January 7, 2020 at 9:25 am Edit

8 & 9
“I heard a sound from the ceiling, so I climbed up during the day to check on it.”
Seeking identity of a person on social media, and why even nobodies have footprints there, while the seemingly rich portrait-sitter — with shocking white hair from the colour-surrounded white-house across the valley — has no such footprints.
White is a colour in its own right? And the sitter’s name that means colour-blindness. Is the red splatter on the edges of this book’s to-be-read pages really red?
Thoughts on ‘Archetypal’, and the synergy or (mis-)synchrony of Japanese and Western Art … of the sitter and the painter. ‘Exchanging fragments’. The need for transformation. The inscrutable difficulty in even sketching the sitter’s face.
Cf the man on the ceiling today here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/man-on-the-ceiling-melanie-tem-and-steve-rasnic-tem/#comment-17822

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- nullimmortalis January 7, 2020 at 9:35 am Edit
  
  Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier now, too.
  
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nullimmortalis January 8, 2020 at 9:26 am Edit

10 & 11
“Her developing breasts would never grow.”
I think I have already mentioned the death of the narrator painter’s sister at age 12, and here we tellingly learn more of this backstory, the “ominous white flowers” in the coffin’s claustrophobia and her “white lace collar so white it looked unnatural.” Collar as colour? The later mound of stones and its mysteriously and accurately timed bell-ringing sound — a sound from within the mound as well as within the sudden surrounding silence — echoes such claustrophobia? And later with the painter speculating on the strange difficulty of managing the sketching of the portrait sitter’s face, his imagined sense of an organism or a direction of sight directed at the painter strangely reminds me of the earlier envisaged act of someone said to be performing on-line remote surgery upon a sick patient. The painter’s sister had heart problems before she died, I now recall.

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nullimmortalis January 9, 2020 at 9:41 am Edit

12, 13 & 14
“He was so still he looked like a lifelike statue.”
Fascinating material about portrait and sitter in general and in particular. Anyone enjoying this book, in aspects of painting and truth, fiction and truth, Gestalt philosophy, Aesthetics, and the narrative doubts of connecting stories told one to the other in the process of portraitist and sitter. And sexual matters interwoven. Yes, anyone enjoying this book should also read the ‘fiction’ works of Brian Howell (who I believe has lived and worked in Japan for many years). And classical music, paranormal religion of shrines, and the connective quality of fiction and truth again (Akinari) regarding that mound of stones. And the lineage and linkage of blood as cross-disciplines, e.g the sitter and the sister, the former’s possible daughter he might have sown during that consuming ‘fictional’ sex scene he recounted via the narrator/portraitist for us to absorb from words spoken one to the other in this fiction, and the portraitist’s late sister?

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nullimmortalis January 10, 2020 at 8:59 am Edit

15
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
“Below the stones lay more stone.”
Excavation of the mound by Hawling … with a backhoe, although they might have needed a crane. The assonance between the buried bell and the speakers for vinyl, Mozart chamber music or modern jazz. What is found, though? Hah, like the workmen were ordered to be, I shall remain mainly silent on that score! But talk of a mummy as a form of suicide, the word ‘mummy’ indeed betokening an ironic or Ligottian anti-natalism. Transcending any Japanese writer’s Intentional Fallacy or Intentional Fantasy. Lost not in Translation but in Transcendence. No, none of this was found. My lips are sealed like a Buddhist’s, as it were. Or do I mean like a Trappist monk’s?
Meanwhile, in our real-times today,..
You Crane
You Hawler
(Erbil once had the Kurdish name Hawler.) (And Trump, after killing a Commendatore, threatened at least cultural collateral damage in the latest potential conflicts, damage similar to what was done to this mound of stones?)
“—was it all just coincidence?”

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nullimmortalis January 11, 2020 at 9:46 am Edit

16 & 17
“In a strange roundabout way I must have freely intertwined my conscious and subconscious . . . I couldn’t think of any other explanation.”
…a sure bit like I find gestalt real-time reviewing to be! Even more so when triangulated (a word I have often used in this context), triangulated with other people processing a particular book in this way. Such triangulation and explicit “intuition” are mentioned in these chapters both figuratively and physically (the stool’s position viewing the work-in-progress portrait), even using the word ‘triangulate’ at one point. And reference to fragments of dream dissolving into each other. And studying (synaesthetically?) the colours being used, e.g. concocting a special green (the battle against climate change?) and a special orange (POTUS?). Eventually my aforementioned shocking-white, these colours of emotion giving a new perspective on the emerging portrait. Its split personality? Meanwhile, the narrator has phone sex with his current girl friend, as set against another reference to the horned owl in the attic. The narrator also compares his ex-wife and the link still between them alongside the image of a shrivelled “mummy.” Related to the once would-be mummy under the mound of stones? And an “anechoic chamber”… and this book is fast becoming a staggering example of what I call Fiction as the Art of the Preternatural, collaterally and culturally.
Finally, there is talk of the colour of the frame of the forthcoming portrait or at least its framework, and this physical book itself has such a framework with its splatter of blood or paint on its page edges. When I read this book in public, I get odd looks!

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nullimmortalis January 12, 2020 at 8:48 am Edit

18
“The dark-red sweater went very well with his white hair.”
“Some trees were redder, others dyed a deeper yellow, and some stayed green forever.”
We watch more unearthing, the ‘hawling’, as I would call it, of the near-abstract portrait, via words, to our sight and to the sitter’s sight. Being a reader within this book is almost like the experiment conducted earlier by the sitter within the deliberately closed excavated mound. It’s like hawling a ‘portrait’ or gestalt from the book, but it’s “still-not-dry.” Another day it may be ‘stone upon stone’ whence we chip its inner statue already within it? A slow-motion earthquake?
“The mummy hunter becomes a mummy.”
“Time passed very slowly on top of the mountain.”
“The white hair was a violent burst of white hair.”

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nullimmortalis January 13, 2020 at 9:35 am Edit

19, 20 & 21
“As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost.“
…and I feel that every morning, with my 72nd birthday in a few January days’ time, in my real-time midwinter, not midsummer, every morning due to pick up this landmark book again. Meanwhile, the narrator remains business-like in his account of his life, some repeated backstory when his wife left him, and new information of a one-night intense sexual relationship with a passing unknown woman when on his random journey after his break-up and a man he also saw at that time in a restaurant, his face never forgotten by this portraitist of special skills, and he starts this new portrait TODAY. Just before seeing or meeting something or someone at night I dare not tell you about for fear of spoilers. Unless it was a dream – which it wasn’t, it seems – it was something or someone seemingly absurd or Twin-Peaksy that he saw which may be a literal spoiler to the whole book any way!

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nullimmortalis January 14, 2020 at 9:46 am Edit

22 & 23
“The longer I looked at the painting, the less clear was the threshold between reality and unreality, flat and solid, substance and image.”
…and that painting is the Killing Commendatore one itself, the painting painted by the house’s previous resident, the famous Japanese, now senile, nonagenarian. And the narrator doubles down on what I called an absurdity yesterday above. Talks to it about beef jerky et al. Thelonious Monk, meanwhile, provides an example of gestalt real-time reviewing in music. Read it and see. These chapters, by the way, end with my favourite Schubert: the D804 String Quartet. This and a memory of his young sister’s escapade in an Alice tunnel not unlike the sitter’s sitting under the mound of stones, but was it the ignition of that premature death process in his sister if not the sitter, the narrator wonders. Carroll’s Alice, too, an example of that reality/ unreality interface that provides a truth of a dream or imagining as a reality even realler. Holes big enough for people, or holes not thus big enough, named. Hawling from holes. Holism as healing. The Big-Headed People. Our heads or cerebral cortices big enough to read Proust. I have read Proust twice. My head must be even bigger than I imagined! That head is now compared to the sitter’s white-house, once like a cruise liner on the horizon, is now visited by all of us, along with the narrator. The portrait on the sitter’s wall, safe beyond the Intentional Fallacy of its painter. By the way, please note the legend of the vampire about not being able to enter somewhere without invitation. I duly invite you to enter this book and the various places within it. Inside your own head.

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nullimmortalis January 15, 2020 at 1:05 pm Edit

24, 25 & 26
“Something that goes beyond the boundaries of portrait painting, yet remains a convincing portrait.”
…this book and its doubling down on a particular talking absurdity or reality-dream, included! Specialist binoculars between truth and fiction, or house and house across the valley, and why. Meanwhile, re the sitter and a sister, these three chapters’ main topic, is where the sitter (whose would-be tête-à-tête dinner-party with the narrator is here evocatively conveyed, bespoke chef and waiter in attendance, not forgetting the aforementioned ‘absurdity’) requests a favour for his possible ‘daughter’ — the sitter’s assumed and unacknowledged love-child of 13 who reminds the narrator of his sister at a similar age before she died — to be painted as a creative portrait by the narrator. The feasibility of this project and its circumstances are discussed, too. This book is uniquely a captivating if business-like dream in many ways, and I am captivated, too, by the synergetic or symbiotic relationship of the sitter and the narrative portraitist. Mutual portrait of a portrait, a strengthening rather than a dilution.

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nullimmortalis January 16, 2020 at 9:19 am Edit

27, 28 & 29
“I explained in general the difference between ‘croquis’ — rough sketches — and ‘dessan’. A dessan is more of a blueprint for a painting, and requires a certain accuracy.”
As well as croquis and dessan, the power of painted portraits, their instinctive skills and dreads or dreams associated, we also have here mention of Kafka’s fascination with slopes, people’s names like Akikawa (cf Aickman), words like Candela and Anschluss, the history of the latter in 1938 Vienna featuring the now nonagenarian painter and the eponymous painting, the Cheshire Cat, women’s clitorides (well, what else but women’s?), allegories or metaphors, symbols as truths, and sieves.
I, for one, look forward to the narrator starting his portrait of the previous sitter’s supposed daughter, whose face we have now at least glimpsed via the sketches of it the narrator made in the classroom where he teaches her and other young students.

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nullimmortalis January 17, 2020 at 9:27 am Edit

30, 31 & 32
“From her black bag she took out a thick paperback with a bookstore’s paper cover.”
The 13 year old sitter’s chaperoning aunt, that is. And the above quote about the aunt sort of begs a question, bearing in mind what I have already said about the exterior of this fat paperback I am reading and reviewing. Still one can read much even into thinness, too, like those bodies once at Treblinka, I guess. Beyond three blinks. This book indeed has a new sitter for its narrator, a sitter that ‘intertwines spirits’ with his own late sister. A sitter that, like me, studies ‘Killing Commendatore’. I study it all in detail, too, but only impart to you parts that I have judiciously chosen. The postcard of a polar bear on an iceberg, notwithstanding.
“My breasts are really small, don’t you think?”

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nullimmortalis January 18, 2020 at 10:07 am Edit

PART 2
THE SHIFTING METAPHOR
33
I LIKE THINGS I CAN SEE AS MUCH AS THINGS I CAN’T
“She seemed totally engrossed in the book. I was even more curious than before as to what it might be, but I didn’t ask.”
So, I won’t ask the new sitter’s aunt, either. I will simply remark that an aunt usually is or was someone’s sister. (As I implied before, I reckon it is THIS book she is reading. Her secrecy to hide her embarrassment over the red splatter on the white pages’ edges.)
More portrait business between the narrator and the new sitter, but little done other than their bonding – towards the portrait’s eventual success. Talk of deaths, the difficult in connecting with dear dead people. As I try to connect with this book as well as to connect things within it — and to other books. And to my life. The shifting metaphor. The gestalt on the horizon as I reach 72 today:
nullimmortalis

January 18, 2020 at 8:45 pm Edit

34 & 35
“As if the drawings of Mariye somehow meant more to him than Mariye herself.”
Mariye, the young sitter’s name, and we begin interactions here between the various parties, e.g. aunt, narrator-portraitist, Mariye and the previous sitter, random as well as deliberate interactions, that they are. Dare not be more specific for fear of spoilers. I wonder if the ‘absurdity’ I mentioned earlier hasn’t turned up recently because he is a sort of unwelcome spoiler in himself? Meanwhile, more about a near obsession with car makes by certain parties, and distances and sights and properties across the valley discussed, flirtations with truth if not necessarily with future seductions. And the light in eyes. And the young 13 year old sitter knowing the local area like the back of her hand, as she wanders at night. Herself a spoiler? I wonder. Anyway the two references to air pressure in car tyres has made even me wonder if I should check my own car’s! And just noticed that the word narrator (as I call him, through whom we see everything, or THINK we see everything), narrator as a word not a person, has an assonance (if inexact) with the two words portrait and painter as blended into one.
“The slightest facial movement radically transforms the whole atmosphere. When I paint her portrait, I have to get past those superficial differences to grasp the essence of her personality. Otherwise, I’d be conveying part of the whole.”

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nullimmortalis

January 19, 2020 at 3:46 pm Edit

36 & 37

Please excuse the lengthy quote. Seems it made me think that this was the bit Mariya’s aunt must have just read, too, in her fat covered paperback! The narrator, when later sketching this pit (under the mound of stones), imagines seeing, via pareidolia in this drawing, a body-part that prefigures the next meeting with his girl friend!… Later he meets up with his landlord, the son of the famous, now nonagenarian painter, and they discuss the latter and how he did his artistic work in the house. Does such a long-term inhabitant of a property leave his soul, aesthetics and ethos to seep into that property? I have lived in my chalet-bungalow so far for the last 25 years, wherein I have intensely thought things and written my material of fiction and of gestalt real-time reviewing, and I have often wondered about such a phenomenon, too. They also discuss the nonagenarian’s history in Vienna during the Second World War and his brother who was involved in the massacre of Nanjing. I bet all that info-dump history bored Mariya’s aunt more than it did me. 😐

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nullimmortalis

January 20, 2020 at 8:52 am Edit

38 & 39
“Dolphins have the power to put the right or left half of their brain to sleep.””
Begs the question, I wonder, whether the sleeping half can dream. Well, there is talk here of ‘coincidence’, ‘triangulation’ and ‘intentions’ (just noticed by autocorrect that ‘intentions’ is only one letter different from ‘inventions’), plus the mutual synergy between a sitter and a portraitist (as there is between a book and its reader?) and such synergy, too, in the formation of Ideas by Idea-makers, the dolphins and Commendatores notwithstanding. Much talk, too, about ‘boredom’ and how it is needed to spur one on to things so as to disperse that boredom. Significant that I already mentioned being bored in the previous entry above. And indeed there are some more near-boring or attritional info-dumps in these two chapters. Finally, today, how stupid could I be! It has only just occurred to me that having a paper cover on this fat paperback would not hide the the red splatter on its pages’ edges, vis à vis the equally fat paperback that the aunt is still reading (!) — while the narrator does the portrait together with the often sullen Mariya (well, 13 year olds are ever thus, I guess). Octopi trying to survive by eating their own legs and Strauss’ Der Rosenklavier, notwithstanding. Not forgetting the dolphins again.

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nullimmortalis

January 20, 2020 at 10:14 am Edit

Reading, an hour later, a story called THE HORSE REVELATION here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/allus-cold-by-matt-leyshon/#comment-17937, I was reminded that chapter 39 above mentioned the Trojan Horse concept at relative length. And, further, that fiction to the reader is itself potentially a Trojan Horse, which thought is very relevant to Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing.

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nullimmortalis

January 21, 2020 at 8:44 am Edit

40 & 41
“There in the dark, in the middle of the night, we were frozen, like two statues.”
Two relatively short chapters. This book seems automatically to adjust the size of its chapters to match the current day’s availability of time in the constraints of my normal life to deal with it.
I dare not of course tell you here what sounded like an earthquake in the middle of the night and what or who the narrator tells us he found Kafkaesquely staring at the eponymous painting from the narrator’s borrowed painting-stool. Not a cat chasing its tale.
“I followed those fragmented, meandering thoughts. Like a kitten chasing its tail.”

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nullimmortalis

January 21, 2020 at 9:00 am Edit

I sometimes feel I am Long Face looking at the book’s action from a manhole-like hole, but only there when the author is not looking back (or forward?) to see me!

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nullimmortalis

January 21, 2020 at 9:21 am Edit

Cross-referenced with ‘The Lamia’s Sweeping’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/allus-cold-by-matt-leyshon/#comment-17951

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nullimmortalis

January 21, 2020 at 4:39 pm Edit

Cross-referenced with Dudak’s Salvage: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/10/black-static-73-interzone-285/#comment-17952

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nullimmortalis

January 22, 2020 at 10:29 am Edit

42 & 43
“Quietly, so as not to wake Yuzu, I descended from the ceiling to stand at the foot of the bed.”
The narrator remembers a dream where he descends from the ceiling and proceeds very erotically to rape his then estranged wife. His wife had left him for another man as I think I disclosed earlier in this review. But now with the memory of this dream having coming back to him, it seems to raise a question of the timing of that dream and his now ex-wife’s forthcoming baby! Reality has got a screw loose, as it says a bit later, in a different innocent context, in these chapters! And earlier the narrator talked to his landlord (innocent catalyst for his wife having met that other man in the first place, it now transpires) about the future prospect of visiting the landlord’s father, the famous nonagenarian, who is so senile he can’t tell his own balls from two eggs. Later, the narrator fries two eggs for breakfast, but I don’t think that connection was intended! Anyway, I have now broken my rule of reviewing discretion by issuing a possible spoiler above in the shape of the narrator raping his ex-wife in a dream. A dream described here in raunchy detail. I have done this as I find it amazingly connective, at least obliquely, with my concurrently reading ‘The Man on the Ceiling’ by a married couple in prior collaboration, viz. Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem, here. A connection that seems to make #GestaltRealTimeReviewing even more illuminating than even I once believed! Potentially illuminating, as I do not know how such connections work nor how they might point to truths or illusions.
Herman Melville’s sardines instead of whales, notwithstanding.

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nullimmortalis

January 23, 2020 at 9:12 am Edit

44 & 45
“I was painting Mariye’s portrait, yet I could sense elements of my dead sister Komi and my former wife Yuzu creeping into the work. This wasn’t intentional—“
As with this book, and my reviews of this and other books, something often seems to take me over. Later this happens with his on-going painting of the pit of stones, earlier likened to a body part (although I may have imagined such a likening by the book), now contiguous with a trompe l’oeil. The latter concept and a felt premonition represent a severe cliffhanger in the plot at the end of these chapters. One that irresistibly urges me to read on in the book straightaway! But I shall resist.
As an aside I intend to make a coffee reference link to my reading yesterday here of ‘The Dead Man’s Coffee’ and of today’s Guardian article about coffee and mathematics!

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nullimmortalis

January 23, 2020 at 9:49 am Edit

Later cross-referenced again: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/allus-cold-by-matt-leyshon/#comment-17968

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nullimmortalis

January 23, 2020 at 3:29 pm Edit

46 & 47
To transcend stone walls, or to listen to Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto? I have indeed chosen the latter and also to succumb to read more of this book today. Talking of walls, Berlin’s or the pit’s, seems strange when this worrying cliffhanger is still unresolved. Just a cheap Penguin pendant to go on, so far. And a boundary of rules involving time, space and probability. And the ‘absurdity’ visits the narrator again and, under pressure from the narrator to break the rules, it advises that the narrator will get a phone call tomorrow that he must not decline — but at what cost, that advice? Tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, I guess.

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nullimmortalis

January 24, 2020 at 2:30 pm Edit

48 & 49
“That the right and left sides of a woman’s face don’t match up. Did you know that?”
Meanwhile, outside of the prevailing suspense of the cliffhanger… is a woman’s face like the right and left sides of a dolphin’s brain? Rhetorical question. I have many rhetoricals in this review but I need to make reference to them in case there is a preternatural pattern being built up here, unknown even to the author and his translators themselves. Like the Spanish Armada. Using a particular car because music cassettes can be used in it instead of CDs. Meanwhile, outside of the prevailing suspense of the cliffhanger (as I say), the narrator now visits the senile nonagenarian in his care home, visits him along with his son. Many sensible things half-sensed? Like the narrator’s reference to the attic and its horned owl. And the attic’s storage capabilities. This book itself as a storage for things until we can use them properly? Like the fateful chances of meeting other characters from far back in the book, and now, at the end of these chapters, there is the arrival in the nonagenarian’s room of something or someone that starts a new cliffhanger… Meanwhile, can a tourist bus be used to figure in a plot scene simply so as to blot something else out in the car park? Each scene in this book is a wayward painting or a series of wayward paintings, in different stages of being painted, till not being wayward at all? It’s just us onlookers who are wayward. ALL of us.
“It’s dumb, I know, but I’ve never really gotten comfortable with phones taking pictures. I’m even less cool with cameras making phone calls.”

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 10:11 am Edit

50 & 51
“Everything was connected somewhere.”
And I stab this book (hence the red splatter on its page edges?), in the same way as an IDEA within it invites its Narrator to do so to it, with the intention of transcending the torrent of history. I have already glimpsed ahead and seen the next chapter as a man in an orange cone hat as its title. Am I, as gestalt reader of this book, representative of Long Face tentatively lifting the manhole of this book from within it!? Only the unique truth of fiction can have such IDEAS, I guess.

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 11:01 am Edit

52 & 53
I may have just stabbed this book because of its potentially growing or perceived ludicrousness. Perhaps I am its so-called ‘Double Metaphor’?… yet, like Long Face, “I am enjoined to verify and record these events. I do only what I am told to do. You have my word.” My logos.
“…subject to the principle of connectivity.” “I stepped down into the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor.” “One absurdity after another sauntered through my mind as I pushed down the endless slope.” This book told me earlier that Kafka was fascinated by slopes? Grilled cheese and Richard Strauss. The river at “the conjunction of phenomena and expression.” Don’t go there!

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 11:25 am Edit

This seems to be some sort of tipping-point in my review.
No plot spoilers policy still being pursued.

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 1:42 pm Edit

54 & 55
“But the head lacked a face. Where a face should have been was blank.”
But, as I say, perhaps I am one of the Double Metaphors myself or, if not, these Double Metaphors “fatten” me as well as themselves. Or I fatten myself (or my and others’ books?) upon THIS book, ironically with my having already stabbed it to death!
Meanwhile, how can one paint a portrait of a blank face? Reading it in the way I read this book is tantamount to shaping a portrait of it, following an instinctive path, one that here involves a ferry, towards crawling into a narrowing version of Alice’s tunnel, a place beset with giant Lilliputian miniatures… but of course, if you have been paying attention, you will perhaps guess where the tunnel really ends up….a journey that takes your breath away.

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 2:32 pm Edit

56 & 57
“An Idea never felt hunger, while I did.”
The tipping-point careering me down the slope of this book’s endgame? Things are now panning out more expectedly, I fancy. Explanations to be given, a vanishing reconciled for others’ quandaries. How had his chin stayed smooth over three days? Of course, in portraits, I say, chins shown smooth stay smooth. A sketched omelet, too. The claustrophobia of the erstwhile tunnel merely to make two girls one? Sitter and Sister. The narrator’s married girl friend’s daughter, too? The girl friend whose own ‘pit’ he had sketched several times…
“Against being hauled from the dark into the light.”

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 4:48 pm Edit

58, 59 & 60
“Like there are these fragments floating around, and I can’t figure out how to piece them together.”
Each reader with his own personal fragments. Like “the beautiful canals of Mars. Where Martians row gondolas with golden oars.” Now with the corona of each virus, in today’s real-time, and Corpo Celeste. And Mars evokes 13 year old Mariye’s name and, as in these chapters, reprises her obsessions with her own signs of developing breasts. Or the obsessions with her flat chest of anyone (like the narrator) who recasts or reshapes these thoughts of a girl just past puberty in a lengthy reported speech as a sort of info dump as seen directly through Mariye’s eyes, as she intrudes into the white house opposite, an empty house where she finds specialist binoculars positioned looking back across the valley directly at her own bedroom window with orange curtains. A requiem of a person standing behind a portrait’s paint, as a separate fragment. Epiphany with an attic’s horned owl. Fashionable clothes in mothballs. CDs too linear without the necessary tipping-over of the vinyl, midway. The percentages of truth.
“The slope behind the house had been turned into a large Japanese-style garden.”

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nullimmortalis

January 25, 2020 at 7:37 pm Edit

61, 62, 63 & 64
“‘Affirmative. Beware of those hornets. They are the most virulent creatures,’…”
Virulent is an interesting word. I had never seen the word virus hidden in it till now. Just as Mariye – before her breasts started growing – was hidden inside a room of mothballed clothes while reading man-sweaty National Geographical magazines. An earthquake proof room, and the narrator is now able to look back at a major earthquake and tsunami that was then in the future – involving a nuclear power station. At least in this case it was the world that did it, unlike with Chernobyl earlier. Still the world is mankind’s world, handled like a penguin pendant, the responsibility of those of us who wear it. Mozart knew of such labyrinthine concepts, at a very young age. In many ways an unsatisfactory denouement with parenthetical timeline adjustments or clarifications between the narrator’s tunnel journey and the duration of Mariye’s intrusion into the white house. But in many ways that makes this the perfect denouement. It is a story that evolved organically beyond the control of the author, if not the narrator. But that makes it seem real. “, so real, I feel as though I could reach out and touch them.” To touch each character. Even to touch the ‘absurditiies’ who could talk. And the people we knew in the book who were strong enough to withstand the major earthquake and tsunami by being in this book. And the narrator’s sperm that was transmitted by dream. This is not fiction as mere magic realism, but it is fiction to the nth power of its own magic fiction. Idea and Metaphor extrapolated by the exponential synergy of human sweat and spirit.
end

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