NOTION PRESS 2020
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jayaprakash-satyamurthy/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
NOTION PRESS 2020
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jayaprakash-satyamurthy/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
COME TOMORROW & other tales of Bangalore terror
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COME TOMORROW
“Living so close to the slum, we began to be shaped by it, too.”
It was as if I was meant to read this intensely haunting story today and the ‘ghost’s ghost story’ within it, my own ‘come tomorrow’ having now come, three years after this book was published, three years after its Mother Plague started, its portrayed superstition or pukka religion flensed and flayed, and before I test my own suspicions of its coming within me, despite having lived on its edge for all this while.
Anthropomorphisms — at this cusp of different social mœurs — cusp of posh and poor, later of town and city, speaking of the slum close by and plague and the narrator’s own dysfunctional mother. The sense of being wrapped in vermin like a warm protective coat or to be gnawed away by it? And, here, such feelings are mediated by this story about the growing up of a young man who has sex with a ghost? And much more I dare not divulge. It has to be read as a whole. And placed in a context I have not yet established for myself.
My personal theme and variation based on quote above — Living so close to the sun, we began to be shaped by it, too. That Corona that ironically crowns us for what we have done.
Cross-reference to the Vienna story here a day or so ago: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/blank-pages-by-bernard-maclaverty/#comment-26572
Dancer of The Dying
“A borderland, a limbo.”
That cusp again, Hindu/Catholic, Bangalore/Goa, originality/plagiarism, commercial jingles versus something far more spiritual or intrinsic. The story of Kenneth who hears a tune out of silence, watches what turns out to be the eponymous dance, then subconsciously cross-references it towards a new gestalt or successful jingle jangle morning… and eventually the conjuring of the Plague Mother with whom or what I am now co-existing in some limbo. No way I can do justice to this story, in such circumstances, but it will now certainly stay with me. The essence of place and crossed borderlands. A place I have never been, but now I have surely been there.
The Song of The Eukarya
“Patterns are everywhere. Do you know I see patterns in everything? Or meaningful shapes. I even see patterns hidden within patterns.”
For me, a major revelation. This story, if I had never read it, I would always regret not doing so. I don’t want to be presumptuously self-consumed in this review, but those who have followed my output over the years and also read this story will know exactly what I mean. The jingle in the above story transposed to a piano becomes part of the woman narrator’s life, a woman who was temperamentally nervous of associating with what she called ‘men’, but she is attracted to a male bookseller with a confirmation-bias of mutual synergies and synaesthetic pareidolia and apophenia, yes, a jingle now the eponymous song of the eukarya as a new vantage point on what I can only call the intricate mites of the gestalt. In the story, this eventually is part of making the bookseller the source of spreading fungus, and all this certainly suits the frame of mind that Co-vivid dreams in recent days of actually having Covid itself is still giving me! There is so much else that you will garner from the story…
But it has strangely given me hope — having induced me to write about it, after days of just staring into space!
“It flattened things out, kept details in the background and prevented him from making too many connections and building his own wild gestalt.”
A separate front page version of the previous review above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/the-song-of-the-eukarya-by-jayaprakash-satyamurthy/
With a title, postscript and two illustrations.
A Threshold Hypothesis
“It’s never a dream.”
This is a continuous co-vivid dream indeed, a palimpsest of stated specific SF and other literature and history and what a city was, is and will be, and the reader is addressed as you as part of a collusion like I’m being told that you’d think I am making you think this or think that – another fourth wall or threshold transcended, and I sensed that whatever it was that inspired me during my self-seen heyday of writing a weirdmonger’s story-particles in the 80s and 90s must have read ahead to this work with, inter alia, its night soil workers and talking to old men in pubs, and I have been inspired all over again.
The Old Brick House
Another Bangalore-pervasive story, this one of the inevitable crossed paths of destiny and how they pursue you. A frame story that is you and and an autonomous inner ghost story of a temple with so-called myths and real revenants into your own present day life’s aspirations.
Shadow Me No More
This is the potentially archetypal clinging shadow story, seemingly autonomous shadow as self and shadow as you or them, here surrounding a story told by a gruesome hit man who becomes a gestalt of shadow and us, outcasts all. With an old woman in a hut who who casts spells mixed from shadows in the story’s hinterland of mind. But whose mind other than just mine?
And now becoming this story’s adopted shadow (or vice versa), I can easily imagine such an arguably seminal shadowwork easily slipping into anthologies of classic fantasy fiction or best of collectives like THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH here.
Passion of the reading moment or not, it what it is as I write this.
A Place in the World
“I felt I had been judged.”
A wondrous place, reminding me of Walter de La Mare stories and more of a certain unique character, away from dry documentation of work, with an entity that scoured me, a place where, please forgive a long quote,
“…the beings I sometimes saw coalescing out of dappled sunshine and dust motes, things that I call nephilim or djinn to express the intuition that they were beings who were part of vast hosts and legions in a slant of reality different from our own,…”
and, I too, during my work days of early 70s found places like that, but one such place, removed for the office building I worked in (above the Temple of Mithras in Queen Victoria St); places were more like a different documentation to work at — literature like this Satyamurthy, then as yet unwritten.
The Toys Are Moving
“There are classical concerts taped off the radio.”
You who collect objects and bric-a-brac from people’s lives as obsessively listed here, those tapes were mine from the early sixties, just as one example, toys, videos, vinyls, more gruesome matter, real things, becoming a climactic lethal gestalt, for its own autonomous sake? My whole lot of collectibles of a life now become a single force. A revelation to think of as I figuratively glance in places where I stored them.
“…but I did find that my tapes, audio and video, and my vinyl cross-fertilised in a way the digital media never did.”
One day will the digital merge and its legions, shaft us, too? My question, if not this story’s question, although it forced me to ask it.
‘No More Iron Cross’
Deadpan-told, a metalhead story of a banquet and death, and the lethal capability within yourself, and whether you imagined it all, or not. I can have no empathy with such a world of axes, dwarves and beheadings and I wonder if I could ever have read such a story without blanching or at least halting it halfway. Reading it proved something about myself, I suppose. I got its number, though, and figuratively put it in my notebook, and short of this brief duty review of record, I hope it will not remember me!
Cross-referenced TOYS ARE MOVING with Fracassi’s MURDER BY PROXy here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/02/17/interzone-294/#comment-26604
Axes of Discordance
“They had patterns in their head, and they projected them onto the world.”
This novelette flows beautifully. I understood all of it, despite me never being in Bangalore nor learned about its customs, its clans or churches. It has SF and HPL and much else in this ring world and the occult running through its veins and music performance that happens in a flow of word and note with the off-syncopation of some devil drummer. So much to tell you, so much I shall leave for you to read yourself, so much that I thought I could never empathise with — the as yet unrequited love-world of the narrator and fey lady Cloudy, and their foe Francis X. Which the shadowy third? A fine climax to this book. I was there compos mantis, praying mentis, with every reference of literature with which it teemed. It made me feel that I was there and understood it all, even if other parts of me didn’t. I wrote this in a spurt, having read this work’s engaging darknesses now transcended.
Veres’ Fogtown, Zelenyj’s Deathray Bradburys, Satyamurthy’s Axes of Discordance,… which the shadowy third? That clinging shadow again.
“all the discords and hobble-footed disjointedness Francis was leading us into, something that needed to burst out and balance things out, some daemon or genius,….”
“‘broken, possessed and stolen/toys before the shrieking furies’.”
“But who was the shadow? Who was the third,…”
end
Desmond Francis Lewis