Somewhere there is someplace

One million eyes can’t see

And somewhere there is someone

Who can see what I can see.

Simple Minds

Long time no write. That’s right. I’ve been… outside for a while, somewhere else. Where elsewhere tempts. Yet, to quote Michael Jordan, AD 1995 – I’m back. I feel an unspecified necessity to be again… You name an ending the ellipsis should turn into. Period. Enough confessions.

The God of Literature has been alarmingly generous towards me in the last two years. Among many of his/her/its blessings was Iain Reid’s debut novel – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. You might have watched its film adaptation or at least mehed at it while picking another Netflix show to binge on. That’s all right. The movie is a separate unassuming masterclass of its own. We are going to leave it alone, though. After all, firing reviews akimbo results in many words that miss or even missing word holes, doesn’t it?

Woven into a straightforward braid of sentences, ornamented with occasional barrettes of enchanting dictionary diamonds like cruciverbalist as well as amusing expressions such as compressed Uma Thurman, the novel saunters on at a slow pace. Its form? A well-balanced blend of highly introspective soliloquy and a regular ‘still-getting-to-know-each-other’ dialog between two self-aware individuals who have recently begun going out together. The above mixture gets interposed by short narrative intrusions which imply some unknown tragedy. What is the couple up to? Meeting his parents who live on a somewhat middle-of-nowhere-ish farm. What happens next? When Jake and his new girlfriend reach their destination, a bizarre, eldritch, suspenseful creepiness kicks in. And? And as it steadily grows, like an untreated cancerous excrescence, we are doomed to succumb to its shattering, malevolent rupture at the very end.

Feeling-wise, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is like a sarcophagus. Stupefying and overbearing, it entombs you in the enthralling entirety of execrable emotions sprouting from existential anguish and regret. With its extremely innate exclusiveness, only true Steppenwolves of the 21st century are chosen to experience its thunderously devastating charm and charring aftereffects. Those who had stared into Nietzschean abyss for so long it became their mirror which does not cast reflections, nor does it stare back any more – it devours alive instead. Those who had been literally thinking of ending things so many times they were forced to reject the very idea itself because, metaphysically, it turned out to be the same in-world event as everything else and there would be no escape whatsoever. Those who eat Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground for breakfast, Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz for lunch and call it a day having a rare steak of Camus’ The Fall and Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary as sides for dinner. Those who dance on a razor’s edge of derangement, a full-blown derailment, complete and thorough detachment from common sense. Those who play ontological hooky. Those who fall uncomfortably silent when Marlon Brando delivers his famous ‘I coulda been a contender’ lament on the back seat of a cab in the movie On the Waterfront. Those who long for inability to reminisce and strive for forgetfulness but do not resort to banal resolutions like drugs or alcohol. Those and only those can see… Hmm, the list of ‘thoses’ grew suspiciously long. Perhaps old Amonne was wrong and the book is inconspicuously inclusive, after all. And we are all howling in our own private unforgiving taigas like there’s no tomorrow, having thoughts that cannot be faked, being stuck in places one million eyes can’t see…

Countless sheets of paper have been printed about an idea of singularity of things. The oneness, undeniably tempting as a phenomenon since time immemorial, may be the only known approximation of eternity immobilized or shall I say immortalized in a ‘snapshot’ of metaphysical unrepeatability which our limited human perception is able to grasp. Temporal and spatial infinity captured, squeezed into a finite ‘package’, tangible enough to be perceived. Sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it? Well, the reverse is even better. Imagine something incredulously infinite, stemming from something totally manageable, within reach of our senses, something we encounter everyday, a common, ordinary thing. A saucepan, a flowerbed, sleeping pills, stuff like that. Reid’s debut is a perfect example of a novel which embodies the very idea. From the lame, almost trite motif he extracts a gateway to immeasurableness which does not lose its palpable dimensions, does not disperse into obtuse abstract lack of referentiality WITHIN the reader. This passage clings on to you, mercilessly. The more have you been tormented by things from the list I mentioned in the paragraph above, the stronger their grip. And the said unrepeatability is one of the most soul-wrenching irreversibilities I have ever come across in literature. Surely, you may find loads of other examples, just go grab the nearest crime fiction you can lay your hands on. You cannot reread it in a way you read it the first time – you know who the killer is. Frankly, all books fall under this category. However, the irreversible nature of I’m Thinking of Ending Things seems to harmonize with a particular resonance of human ability to feel emotions. Not the obvious ones like gratitude, worry or shame but those which would give you hard time putting your finger on them, i.e., almost solipsistic case of loneliness, a prolonged bile which morphs into utter desolation, a state of being metaphysically hounded by wasted opportunities, etc. This is the place where Reid’s novel takes us to. New, unnameable emotions begotten by simple ordinary words. Hats off, Mr. Reid, hats off! You have found eternal ally not only in every Steppenwolf, but also in their far more elusive, almost phantom-like cousins – Desert wolf and Arctic wolf – who are chained into the confines of this barren reality as thoroughly as their HESSEtantly two-faced peer. You have certainly made their night howls a little less haunting, a little less self-annihilating. Maybe even a little less wolfish…

Amonne Purity

This one may begin like this:

I went to the nearby library the other day to finally put my hands on one of the classics spelled with a capital C – Don Quixote. Determined to disdain the numerous translations of Cervantes’ masterpiece, which have effectively prevented me from reading the book for over half a decade (that’s why I have never been able to read Cortázar’s Hopscotch either – neither author’s way of taking the reader by the hand/eye nor the consecutive reading order interests me), with bared fangs, clenched fists and a glare that would obliterate everything and everyone standing in my way, I stormed into the building. Quickly I localized the recalcitrant Spaniard and, as usual, there were at least six of them in four different translations. I fumed and cursed under my breath, exuding sheer wrath as equally classic as the book which at the moment was literally laughing in my face. I tossed the spiteful novel back on the shelf, disgusted more with myself than with its yet another triumph over my hesitant nature, and turned around to make my way to the exit, when suddenly a familiar title caught my attention. Frankly, the idea of reading it had crossed my mind couple of months before it either went astray or died from natural causes of forgetfulness and overlooking. The book was called The Club Dumas and when I flicked through a dozen pages or so and saw a set of nine pictures, the first one showing a knight on a horse, in full armor with his index finger on his mouth, with a Medieval castle towering in the background, my jaw dropped so low that it burst into hundred pieces which I had to pick up from the floor and glue back together at home. In the blink of an eye I forgot all about Cervantes and recalled everything about one movie by Roman Polański. I snatched the book, went up to the librarian, she bleeped, and I got out only to get into one hell of an adventure!

The Ninth Gate is this homogeneously relaxing piece of cinema which you watch neither deliberately nor from the beginning. Most likely you stumble upon it at your aunt’s or when you engage yourself in the immortal activity of flipping brainlessly through channels on your flatter and flatter 20^th (nowadays, 21^st) Century idols. You may also be lucky enough to see it flickering on a bulletproof-like, thick, obsolete CRT screen in a security booth of a stereotypical power plant located somewhere on the outskirts of a perfectly random town. Having drunk countless cans of soda pop culture for far too many years, I am extremely reluctant to show my cavity-stricken crescent of incisors, canines and premolars because of revelations like “Did you know…?”. Yet I was grinning over 10 minutes as a little scamp who just found him/herself a fully operational slingshot when I realized that The Ninth Gate is actually based on a novel – on The Club Dumas itself. The librarian and the passers-by must have had a great laugh – a regular nutcase, with a dim-witted smile and a thousand-yard stare, clutching this soft-covered novel as if it were the holiest treasure on this planet, fleeing from the library in a somewhat unsettling, Mr. Bean-like, fidgety gait…

If you have ever seen The Ninth Gate and you enjoyed it, the first thing you would most certainly experience reading The Club Dumas will be images of Johnny Depp popping up inside your head for the first 50 pages. Don’t you worry, these are going to wear out and wean you gradually off themselves, leaving you only with your own private visualization of the protagonist – Lucas Corso. And it can become pretty memorable, because he, as a character, has been portrayed by Pérez-Reverte with a truly memorable distinction. Corso is this likable sort of fellow who, like the dog-eared first editions and leather-bound incunabula he’s after to make ends meet, tends to fascinate us for his being a little “frayed at the edges”. The cracks, creases and scuffs of his everyday disposition are preceded only by delaminations, folds and wrinkles he keeps hidden up his sleeve for special occasions. What are those? Oh no, I won’t tell. How could I?

Nevertheless, if I were to outline the plot slightly, in one overly long sentence, it would sound like this:

Lucas Corso – a book detective or, as it may be paraphrased, a sly, cynical “ink mercenary” hired by bibliophiles and rare volumes collectors too important or too aloof to get their own hands dirty – accepts a mission to authenticate a manuscript of The Anjou Wine – the first chapter of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers – only to sniff out far more devilish intrigue, in which the literally Supernatural and the literary Superficial bring to life fallen angels, hanged publishers of cookbooks, and characters from Dumas’ novels in the flesh. Or perhaps it isn’t quite exactly so…

To put it simple, the book is pure fun. It does not make faces to us: does not squint, does not stick its tongue out, does not keep its nose in the air. It is to entertain via conveyable modes and literary gimmicks of a slightly crooked, hard-boiled (boiled as hard as a stiff binding of a rare tome already is) detective fiction. Not only does Spanish author pay a marvelous tribute to Dumas’ creative output, serving wild cascades of anecdotes about life and work of the hefty Frenchman, but also, for example, discloses techniques and instructions on how to forge a 17^th Century volume and conjures up one of the most alluring and unobtrusive incarnations of Satan (is it really Him…um…I mean…Her…umm…oh, dear…). Who would want to pass on such a tasty treat? No bookworm, bibliophile, letter maniac and other literature freak, for sure! I wouldn’t (and didn’t) miss out on it either, even though I watched The Ninth Gate probably nine times already and, as I have mentioned before, my sense of taste has been permanently impaired by my corroded teeth and dissolved sweet tooth for general appreciation. Nonetheless, The Club Dumas feels as if some kind of dental procedure has been implemented to help me get rid of a few cavities. By filling them up with – literally – devil-may-care molasses candy Arturo Pérez-Reverte made by hand out of Alexandre Dumas’ recipe and, of course, his own unquestionable, boundless love for letters. Go ahead and help yourself. This “little something” does not cause stomachache, even if munched in large quantities! And your teeth will be safe too!

Amonne Purity

The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty…. In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself – by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another’s.

Stanisław Lem

As it has been ultimately established by this brief excerpt who exactly I am, there is nothing left for me to do but fling my collection of balls and chains onto the bruised, hunched back of mine and commit yet another deliberate act of self-enslavement. My 18^th Sisyphean illusion… My maturation as a hardened captive… I feel ecstatically enthralled to finally be able to transform myself into a genuine thrall by subduing to this very bondage, this utterly flabbergasting pillory whose adjective-defying profundity and supreme dominance has become a milestone in showing the possibility of freedom more boundless and carefree than conditions found inside a literal perfect vacuum. The possibility of freedom which sets all prisoners of letters loose through immobilization outside of time. How? Come along…

You know me. Not even the tiniest fraction of a second will I spent giving you an insight into Stanisław Lem’s life. However, it may be that for the first time I will experience flaying-like pangs of conscience about such a deliberate omission. For during his lifetime spanning 84 years (have I just contradicted myself?), Lem has blessed us – minions of the alphabet – with more than 20 books in total (excluding his heavily philosophical Sci-Fi novels), whose plethora of themes, threads and topics e.g. frontiers of futurology, in-depth Sci-Fi analysis as a literary genre, theory of literature per se, evolution of technology, etc., are still sweeping off one’s feet each and every daredevil who decides to give Lem’s prose a shot (and ‘slaying’ it isn’t a piece of cake, mark my words). To alleviate the unknown tormenting sensation of renouncing my own possibility to introduce him via more down-to-earth, substantial exposure, I am going to resort to the following hypothetical situation. If some sort of a doomsday event were to wipe out not only all cellular life on Earth, but also the very existence of the Earth itself as a planet, and, by some miraculous coincidence, of all the books written throughout the ‘reign’ of humanity, ten were to survive the apocalypse and afterwards gave evidence to a random, otherworldly flyer-by of how remarkably worthwhile and truly stellar us Earthlings once were – doubtless A Perfect Vacuum should be among the lucky 10.

Why such an indelible distinction? Does it really deserve to be put on a pedestal of immortalization? Contrary to what A Perfect Vacuum is and how it ‘beyonds’ within the reader (I had to coin this puzzling verb out of preposition which highlights distance between two objects in order to prepare you for a relentless separation Lem’s tour de force distillates among all day-to-day relations and, by the way, to show you how easily it dissipates between magnificence of pure wit and raw intellectual conceptualization so as to ground and nestle itself inside its own sphere of post-discernibles), I will try and stick to the bare minimum of not hopping into the pool of mush and avoid beating about the bush. Yet, we cut our coat according to our cloth, even if we have the fanciest shears in the world at our disposal, straight from Edward Scissorhands’ spare parts shack (this tailored dictum applies especially to those prisoners of literature who have been locked up inside their own Châeau d’Ifs without the possibility of parole or even the tiniest bit of hope left at the bottom of their souls [Knock it off! How much longer could one possibly count these elusive allusions anyway…]).

Stanisław Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum is a compilation of reviews of nonexistent books. Combining an astounding amount of literary self-awareness – grand yet light and therefore having so extensive a span it could hover gracefully for hours fueled by a single fugacious glimpse – with general polymathic knowledge and exhibiting Lem’s unassuming capriciousness of a sophisticated taunter, this volume of 16 texts is a testimony to what exemplary directions literature has grown its branches into, how gorgeously could postmodernism smile at it’s own kaleidoscopic reflection and what does it take to really rivet someone to a book. From downright not-so-blatant jeers (Gigamesh, Rien du tout, ou la conséquence – splendidly crafted puns on haughty, ultra-highbrow modernistic referentiality to everything and everyone à la Joyce and unconveyable extravaganza of over(ly/-)linguistic Nouveau Roman, respectively) and something which looks like hung up gloves (Sexplosion – a flaccid and frigid result of tampering with far too much consumerism and the basic instinct of dropping our drawers to do you-know-what, Gruppenführer Louis XVI – sociological implications of staying too long in an environment consisting solely of simulacra), through pieces based on ideas wonderfully turned inside out (Pericalipsis) as well as genuinely brilliant (Odysseus of Ithaca) to materials for some exuberant Sci-Fi novels (Being Inc.). Everything then ascends to the area of sui generis, the pinnacle of literary beast mode which harbors the Holy Quaternity of impetuous speculation, refined philosophy, absolute delight and exceptional profundity (Die Kultur als Fehler, De Impossibilitate Vitae and The Impossibilitate Prognoscendi, Non Serviam, The New Cosmogony – not so respectively this time). And now your personal peon o’ letters will pen a sentence or two about them.

Or perhaps I will not. Instead, I am going to tell you that it is of the utmost importance that you should be kidnapped by Lem (with Michael Kandel – his masterly translator – as an accomplice) at some point in your life. What for? For one thing, to experience what the well-known phrase “time out of joint” really means. For another, to see what happens when you are being “teleported” outside of it. Just as we remain immovable riding anywhere but along the tracks of the fastest moving hand of the neverland-like clock in Kensington Gardens (albeit we stick to the rules of staying within the tic-tock routine), here we disappear into more other-ish “outer rims” of timeless separateness, where a heavy-handed yet light-winged imagination makes friends with the purest forms of impossible congruity, only to leave you speechlessly light-headed and prone to long-winded lightheartedness. From the very first review – curiously, of A Perfect Vacuum itself – Polish author executes a remarkably time-consuming (taken very literally here) set of literary gambits and you cannot help but fall for them all. You simply cannot resist their sheer ontological insubordination! The novel is just so different (to fully highlight its state of being different, you would have to use another, as of yet nonexistent substitute of a verb “to be”) and addictive that all you are able to do is cry for more, gasping, bedazzled, astounded, dumbfounded, even slightly dilapidated. Thank Lem there is more. It’s called Imaginary Magnitude and this time it’s a compilation of introductions to nonexistent books. But where does it lead to? Does it ‘beyond’ with reader, too? You would have to see for yourself. My almost mature back hurts like hell from heaving these burdensome balls and chains…

Anyway, if you plan to burrow yourself in a cushy nook of your room or lie prone on some forgotten meadow (not everywhere February means snow!) in the not too distant future in order to read, let Lem burrow and lie beside you. Allow his unmistakable charm to leave a permanent imprint on your letter-seeking eyes. It does not disfigure and most certainly won’t blind you. Quite the contrary, it will polish your lenses and enable you to feast upon images your new hawk-eyed sight would spot, among them only the most powerful genies (or should I write ‘djinnies’?) at your command. Thanks to their magical powers, one day you might get a chance to see or even create something which would outshine the universe-famous “Let there be light” or “In the beginning was the Word”. Hubris? I would say relentless curiosity. “Icarus…” some might languidly retort. Before you snap back at this truly void word and patronizing ellipsis, imagine Sam B. is sitting next to your right whispering calmly in your ear his mercilessly hackneyed “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Besides, there’s nothing more refreshing and liberating than plummeting form the unimaginable heights of perfect vacuums and taking a skinny-dip in the cold waves of another blank piece of paper… Who claims otherwise, well… he/she is just a mere acolyte of imperfect fullness without the slightest chance to immobilize him/herself neither inside nor outside of time. Shame on them! Lucky for us!

Amonne Purity

Two is the beginning of the /beginning/.

James Matthew Barrie /slightly purified/

Yes, the publication date in parentheses is correct. I have dared to leave the safe zone of our beloved 80’s for the conceptual sake of presenting you two texts about two books which are radiant manifestations of yet another double concept – the immobilization inside and outside of time. At first glance, it may look as if our good old Amonne is about to spill yet another bucket of pretentious balderdash onto our shoes or, more likely, eyes, thus divesting us of our already rare everyday “commodity” – time. I am going to contradict this assertion by showing that due to magnificently random occurrences, one is bound to experience new combinations, fuses and concoctions of sensations (the term “sensations” has been used here for lack of a better word; perhaps a portmanteau of the following: “swarming”, “exhilarating”, “contrivance” and “internal” would serve a better purpose, however I do not have time – how ironic! – to come up with portmanteaus left and right). Sensations of time reversals which would make Benjamin Button green with envy, eternities frozen in timelessness so immovable and stationary, that thermal fluctuations at temperatures nearing absolute zero would look like some mosh pit madness at a death metal concert. But enough with these exaggerated disposable comparisons.

Kensington Gardens is this particular type of book which not only falls under the “exclamation marks” category without much effort (the abundance of quotable profundity found in it is absolutely staggering and would easily serve as a so-called “brilliance content” for at least three or four other novels – we draw exclamation marks next to the dazzling passages almost on every page!), but also courts us with its multilayeredness in a flawlessly natural fashion. Rodrigo Fresán’s work takes us on a truly wondrous trip to the late Victorian/Edwardian London as well as to its LSD-driven Swinging Sixties incarnation whose freshly regained poshness of a global city, which has just got up off its knees from the post-World War II era of food rationing and blandness, helped to set standards for how the modern world would look for the remainder of the 20^th century. Poking the issue with a stick would quickly reveal that it involves a consolidation of questions regarding “mechanics” of a certain kind of day-to-day aesthetics: in what ways things would be perceptible, how would they expose themselves in front of us, what would their meaning sound like for us, etc. But all of these are just some generalized yet very marginal notions, almost unworthy to mention, which might pop up inside our heads as we glide along the pages. Besides, we do not want to put the cart before the horse, do we?

One of the main threads of the book is the life of a Scottish writer James Matthew Barrie – the creator of Peter Pan character which was first introduced in a 1902 novel entitled The Little White Bird and immortalized in a play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up two years later. Barrie’s life is recounted in a highly detailed and simultaneously unusual way biographies-wise, for it mysteriously intertwines with recollections of a man who narrates it. The reminiscences of this man, whose name or occupation I shall not reveal (taking into account the new “feelings” Kensington Gardens generates, that would be quite a spoiler), evoke his childhood memories as the Swinging Sixties kid who, almost as if under influence of some sort of magical powder (no innuendos!), had the occasion to experience firsthand the crème de la crème of the delirious 60’s ambience. His parents played in a rock band and therefore all sorts of big names orbited around in his immediate vicinity (David Hemmings, Dennis Hopper, Stanley Kubrick, Catherine Deneuve, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Shrimpton, Dean Martin, Peter O’ Toole, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, Vidal Sassoon, Jimmy Page [solo, no Led Zeppelin then], Peter Sellers, Phil Spector [way before his gun and hairstyle frenzy], Philip Larkin, Brian Jones [without The Rolling Stones], The Rolling Stones [without Brian Jones], Michael Caine, Kray twins, Timothy Leary, to name but a few). These remembrances, which far too many times have been peppered with a sour and tragic seasoning of unfortunate events, constitute the second thread of the novel and – married in an effervescent mixture of awe and stellar warmheartedness with Barrie’s unorthodox biography – play first fiddle in Rodrigo Fresán’s “thread trio”. What plays the second one?

Second fiddle and, by the way, the third thread of Kensington Gardens – a bit undercurrent-ish and, frankly, quite pivotal one – turns out to be purely psychological. Now, as you may or may not know, I loathe psychological novels with every fiber of my being. They are one of the most, if not the ultimately dreadful, hopeless, dragging-down boredom generators ever contrived by humanity. Do you want to experience the utter disappointment of internal ruminations which lead from never to nowhere? Just take a good look at yourself in the mirror after you have rinsed your mouth during the morning session of teeth brushing. Why read about somebody else’s monsters when you can look at yours any time you like? To empathize? To feel catharsis? I have never understood that, just as I have never been able to comprehend, how on earth talking to an allegedly smart bearded stranger with grizzly hair, who wears a black jacket over dark burgundy turtleneck and a pair of brown corduroy trousers (I am being awfully stereotypical, but I guess I could be excused – my licentia poetica is my Savior and only She can judge me…) would help cast the demons out. But I am getting self-sidetracked… There are, of course, exceptions, e.g. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos or The Diary of a Seducer by Kierkegaard (the latter could be found in the first volume of his Either/Or) whose psychological facet is always cut unintentionally, plays the part of a byproduct which is never assessed as the main reason for a novel to appear, or is smuggled subtly from an area where the fuzziness found between the lines meets the murkiness of silence (like brackets within parentheses). The same goes with Fresán’s wonder – the psychological wanderings of his protagonist are somewhat of a result of the idea which exists behind the novel, perfectly ingenuous, deprived of this unmistakable, toxic, regular psychological ingredient which pulverizes your soul mercilessly and turns you into a drowsy creature which yaws wider than hippo’s obtuse snout could possibly open. If you want to throw in some stuff form the brown leather couch, you had better make it innocuously inconspicuous – like Fresán has done. And this, My Fellow Readers, is the highest possible form of compliment from someone who fights like cat and dog with…ahem…psycho novels.

Putting threads of Kensington Gardens back into the haberdashery of belletristic knickknacks, let’s talk about magic. For Fresán’s novel surely deserves this noun to be placed in its description. What is so mesmerizing in this delightful book? Apart from Barrie’s life – his daydreamlike and tragic childhood, first steps into the not so adult, yet dull and adulterous world of adolescence, youth and journalism, meeting and turning the Llewellyn Davies brothers into his own, later on – private, pantheon of Muses, unimaginable and splendorous success of the Peter Pan play, divorce with his wife Mary, the revenge of Demons that lived within him, within the only author who remained ageless enough to write about and personify the immobilization and rejection of the growing up, and who suffered fully from the dire consequences of the above deed – apart from the sweet-and-sour critique of Swinging Sixties and the psychological scarring of the protagonist, Kensington Gardens introduces us to something really luscious. The tasty raisins of ruminations (e.g., a marvelous comparison of literature’s development to certain stages of human life – from its innocent birth in 18^th century, via Wonderlandly-Twisted 19^th century childhood and turbulent Caulfieldishly Hazy excesses of its 20^th century pubescence, to… oh, you almost got me! Naughty, naughty!…), mouth-watering custard pie of predictions about humanity, literature, perception of history, and the like, along with some other delectable morsels – for instance the genesis of a name Wendy – all of it creates this highly flammable orgy of unforgettable literary flavors and elicits imaginary opiate and/or LSD trips to somewhere where there is no ticktock of a clock playing an infinite game of Tic-tac-toe with us. Where noughts and crosses do not spawn endless combinations of nevermores. Where everybody does not have to be a lucky loser or just a plain one – beside, outside or – the worst of them all – inside oneself. Where there are no bad monsters living under our beds or hiding behind closed doors of our closets…

Now, what’s with this “immobilization inside time” Kensington Gardens is responsible for bringing along? Does it have anything to do with keeping everything “frozen” in the eternal stupor of metaphysical obligation of something to be? Or maybe of something to pass? When does it start? Why does it have to be so surreptitious? Here we go, hitting a brick wall again… Nonetheless, if I gathered up my courage to set my doubts aside for a while, I would say that Fresán’s novel does not eject us outside of time. Our presence is well within its boundaries, its plane of influence, its realm of conditionality. However, we are not moving anywhere along it. The most accurate and, at the same time, describable phenomenon which could illustrate the above is this extremely rare and comparatively short-lived subjective time dilatation. It happens when you enjoy something so utterly that you are not only totally disconnected from the rest of the world (no, its not the regular immersion à la GTA: nothing-else-matters-when-I-play-it-San Andreas) but, given the circumstances, you do not even conjecture in a mode of: “Holly crap, I feel as if someone’s just activated bullet time!”. It resembles sitting on a moving bus or a train with all of its windows shut tight. You remain perfectly motionless and the interior of the bus/train is something which redefines the term “astonishing”. Personally, I think it can only occur before you are ten years old. After that – sorry buddy, maybe next time (you’d better pray for the reincarnation in human form to be true!). I myself have experienced it only once: when I watched a movie called The Brave Little Toaster. I must have been no more than 8. And I swear to God/Contingency/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Whatever Demiurge at hand, the movie lasted six hours! Now go check out on IMDb how long the movie really (really?!) is if you care to do so. Kensington Gardens gives you the similar “feeling”. The “feeling” of elfin supremacy Stanley Ipkiss possessed while wearing the titular mask. The “feeling” that taking part in somebody else’s dream inside a dream inside a dream, etc. seems like a child’s play. The “feeling” that you have just been metaphysically rewired and you immediately forget about it, like Peter Pan. It is like a crescendo of a big band consisting solely of children’s first laughs seconds before breaking into thousand pieces to form fairies: unbearable in the beginning, nevertheless, after a while, purely (dis)obligatory, indestructibly innocent, irrevocably courageous. The laugh that blurs the line between the promise, sacrifice and fulfillment. The laugh that solidify our innate internal armor which cannot be pierced through. Not even by pointy, razor-sharp teeth of the ticking crocodile which ate our hand once, and has wanted more ever since. Perhaps, he prowls because he is still missing some hands for the clock inside his stomach? Who knows…

This is how extraordinarily unique Kensington Gardens are. But there exists its perfectly pitched counterbalance, orchestrated by the second part of the concept I have focused on in the previous paragraph – the immobilization outside of time. The only thing I am going to disclose now is the fact that in order to present the said opposite I am going to leave the 80’s one more time and head towards some other decade. What decade? What kind of novel is my next trip going to be about? As for now, my lips are sealed, however you had better keep your eyes open, because I do not intend to put a lid on my inkwell just yet.

Amonne Purity

‘Nothing can rhyme with an orange

Except the pocket on a kilt,

When a sporran is misspelled

To a sporrange with a lilt.

An orange can rhyme with nothing!

The people cry in ignorance:

Forgetting in their ignorrange

That words can be made to dance.’

Zenith O’Clock

Today we are going to dance. The party starts at noon sharp and is scheduled to end – if at all – well beyond each and every until of eternity. The club where the rave takes place, is the first piece of a far more voluminous conce(p/r)t held in store, coming in volumes of multidimensionality preceded by as yet unknown prefixes. Due to my involvement as a mere reading pupils and scribbling fingertips, it is still in progress, insatiably digressive, sometimes painfully regressive, tempting and taunting aggressively, all at once, all at twice, etc. I do not know yet where it would take me, me – a pair of eyes and a set of ten fingers – ogling and groping the shapes, the curves, the nuances of these glyphs o’ fun, devised by a man who always casts the shortest shadows and deploys the longest ellipses…

So here we are, standing in front of the club, the walls of which conduct waves of muffled rhythmic thuds, making our insides wobble. We can enter without any bribery, flattery or other demeaning trickery. Everybody is on the bouncer’s list: lisping listeners, flustered flashers, grinchy graspers, flimsy floppers, faulty flautists, fitting stiffs, sniffy drifters, flawless outlaws, haughty naughties, doting nothings, and many more irksome in(k)som(a)nia(c)s. This endless list does not confine itself exclusively to people, however a little girl is calling the shots and shouting the calls from its top. She and her automated self. Stop being so perplexed – you must have met her before, her unreal incarnation, of course, while singing misspelled carols, doubled hither and tither! You do not remember? Then allow me to refresh your memory and introduce you to her anagrammed twin sister or, as I should put it correctly, nureal twin twister, as well as the rest of the feasting guests.

Let’s melt into the cacophonous thumping and the thundering din of the beat. Smoke machines causing severe outbursts of whooping cough. Never mind that, full steam ahead! Rapid flashes of strobes are stop-motioning the narrative ‘premises’. We immediately recall the ‘glitchless’ quality of Lewis Carroll’s previous wondrous and glassy ‘parties’. A boredom-stricken Alice is being ridden with drowsiness, awaiting another dull writing lesson with her Great Aunt Ermintrude. An unfinished jigsaw puzzle set depicting a zoo is lying around on the table, a few pieces missing, nowhere to be found. Alice has not done her homework on an ellipsis, but to make matters worse, she gets tricked by her aunt’s parrot called Whippoorwill (indeed an interesting species of name for a green-and-yellow-plumed PARROT) into letting him out of the cage. The colorful rascal, who speaks only in riddles, vanishes then inside the grandfather clock’s workings, only to be followed by agitated Alice…

The general outline of Noon’s ‘club’ is that of a well-zonked blend of lightweight mystery fiction and some playful ‘Carrollness’ for grown-ups, topped with a few touches of nonsense. Were we to get into details (not many of them to share; I will not strip you of the undeniable pleasure of checking them out all by yourselves), I would give you only the tiniest bits of the icing on a cake, those crumbs that are found mostly between none and some. Or maybe before noon and (in the) after-Noon? The ones that whet one’s appetite for the ‘Worderland’. For instance: Alice’s question about how to make Heaven-knows-what, hilarity of frequent mishearings (e.g. windscreen vipers, a beanery system), highly allusive characters (a trumpeter named Long Distance Davis who plays or, at least, tries to play his song called Miles Behind; a Spiderboy director called Quentin Tarantula, notorious for his extremely graphic, so-called “flutters”), genuine portmanteau inventions (auto-hearse – an automated horse used for the transportation of corpses), a dialog between Alice and another character, whose hishshing, shibilant, Sean-Connery-like shtyle of shpeaking amushingly dishtortsh the whole convershation and – one of the linguistic crème de la crèmes – the infiltration of the Central Librarinth of Manchester by our little protagonist and her automated alter ego. Not to mention Alice’s A-OD (almost-overdose) on wurms, the omnipresent aftermath of Newmonia epidemic and the leitmotif of the Jigsaw Murders…

Automated Alice is a remarkable piece of ‘soundscaping’ machinery. Its spin-off-ish, crescendo-like quality conveys top-notch fills to the radiant to(n/t)ality of boisterousness awaiting us in Noon’s next/previous novels. For as I might or might not have vaguely implied earlier on, the following text is the first result – out of four in total – of a certain prequelo-sequelling investigation of mine. Going backwards in time (let’s call this trip a “temporal prequeltion”), taking off from the most unobtrusive trequel of all times, Jeff Noon’s ‘univurtse’ has recently transformed its unassuming buds into cascading vines of fecund blooms for me (my, oh my, am I not spilling the beans right now?!)…

Shrugging off the tendency to obfuscate as much as possible: what is Automated Alice all about, taken as a first part of a much prolonged ‘after-Noon party’? As usual, I am not sure. It may have something to do with letters being in a state of ‘never’. The ‘never’ which neither curtails nor forbids, but somehow entails and predicts. It is the optimistic ‘never’, the ‘never’ of more than childlike beginnings, the ‘never’ of self-assurance which does not need any kind of assurance at all, because it has been protruding to our universe from somewhere where possibilities, which detest every kind of slavery (psychological, economical, sociological, metaphysical, even if it were as innocent as the above mentioned, marginally oppressive feeling of self-confidence), feed not on the consistency of being to change in general, but on the flux of potency to play, to invent, to wander and to wonder in the Worderland (and other lands too!). Going for a stroll in the Worderland enables other, possibly yet-to-come, ‘components’ of reality to blossom. That is why Automated Alice summons the very finest ‘scent’ of the neo-pantheistic vision of Multiverses to be born. Multiverses comprising not only verses, but also mash-ups of moving pictures, remixes of technological intrusions (whatever they might be), collages of imaginary speculations and other ‘unnamabilities’ of poly-futures. Never has the ‘never’ of letters come closer to our reality, never has it retained the lightness and timelessness of its immaculate possibilities (as opposed to, e.g. heavy linguistic stomps of Finnegans Wake which exhaust our forbearance for their untouchably brilliant yet overripe, mature unbearableness) than in Noon’s Automated Alice. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would definitely shed a tear of infinite joy upon seeing his Alice once again so ‘carrollfully’ portrayed, being able to go forth and back in time with her to taste the foreboding fruits of her automated reverie along the way. Maybe he has already done that?… To find out, come with us, My Dear Reader, but please, do not forget to sport your after-Noon frock coat and a pollen counter. Why the latter? Jeff Noon and I are going to tell you. Soon.

Amonne Purity

“Profanity of words” – the phrase for today. Unnecessary sentences and paragraphs served as additives, which suddenly begin to host a curved hump of a “c” in the very center of their now addi-c-tive ‘vicinity’. All the letters scribbled about their next of kin eventually fall under this highly ambivalent category. These secondary, even tertiary mirages, echoes and aftershocks of something which has already been written, these passages made out of crumbling plaster, casted in a mold capable of enduring liquid wolfram, titanium and gold, seem to play many different roles, the most valuable ones being: highlighting, encouraging, popularizing, informing, simplifying, etc., but, unfortunately, every rose has its thorn – they can also: bore, outrage, disconcert, exaggerate, flaunt, and so on. On rare occasions (are they really that rare?), the sacrilege conveyed by the derivativeness of texts about texts hits the critical level. Ever since the speech and its penned down twin – the writing – have been held in silver esteem, the only solution applicable to their blasphemous superfluity was to repent and dip our pens in an ink of silence, which has always been thought of as golden in color (indeed, it is the most pregnant element of language to this day). But what would happen if we could get someplace via neither silence nor words, where we would not only break free from the chains of letters riveted to the hoary chestnut called Profanity, but also stimulate our imagination to synthesize genuinely trailblazing ‘platinum’, which would simultaneously retain the possibility to get desecrated, defiled, sullied, yes, but only in a positive manner? We would have to set out on a journey throughout Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story.

As much as children literature is considered a genre, which has often delivered portrayals of something from a domain of human life that exists and should exist (tightening knots of friendship, overcoming hardships, handling and reciprocating gratitude, etc.) by means of things which simply do not (unicorns, enchanted castles, powerful wizards and the like), as opposed to the traditional fiction, which has been focused more on creating stories about things in various ‘modes’ of existence (e.g. mysterious relations overlooked in the everyday hurly-burly, perplexing sensations, bewildering chains of events, ontologically unlikely characters, etc.) using ‘cogs and sprockets’ of a narrative exhibiting real, palpable, down-to-earth consistency – their blend, which a well-crafted attempt is The Neverending Story itself, may be perceived as a pretty unusual nexus. That is why Ende’s most renowned novel parades without any complexes among such seminal titles of prepubescent literature as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and Peter and Wendy, although being much younger than its classic ‘siblings’. It also would not look immature, if we shelved it next to some C. S. Lewis’ novels or J. D. Salinger’s short stories. Nevertheless, the splendor of strut undoubtedly overshadows the maturity of presence. So what distinguishes The Neverending Story from its ‘underage’ peers, then?

A hunch is whispering in my ear a plausible prompt that the certain ‘area of expressions’ undertaken by German author is what stands out here the most. Alice’s wonderful exposure to and exposition of linguistic, temporal and spatial playfulness, Pooh’s delightful silliness and Peter’s adventurous raucousness can be counterpointed with Ende’s genuine inclination towards literature and all the multi-dimensionality it denominates, a longing for an endless escape to infinity or maybe for an infinite escape to endlessness and a deep allegory about growing (not necessarily up), going astray and being saved by self-redemption (with a little help from kind friends). All of this is seasoned by an absolutely unpretentious, almost hidden morals we are obliged to crystalize on our own and a quintessential flavor every solid fiction should be saturated with – the sweetness of sheer magic.

The novel tells a story of Bastian Balthazar Bux, a bowlegged, chubby, rather clumsy, somewhat disillusioned, often neglected by his widowed father and definitely bullied by school hoodlums ten-year-old boy, who, under the it-just-turned-out-this-way circumstances, steals a novel entitled “The Neverending Story” from an antiquarian bookshop owned by a man called Carl Conrad Coreander. Being pricked by his conscience and ridden with a feeling he has nobody to turn to and nowhere to go, Bastian decides to lock himself up on the school attic, where he can read his randomly obtained loot. However, after several chapters, our little avid reader, name ‘generator’ and storyteller (his only irrefutable skills and virtues) finds out that The Neverending Story is not just another ordinary story, which could be stolen from a second-hand bookstore, and experiences first-hand even more than literally, what it means to be totally gripped by and get into the plot…

Perhaps the wisest way to describe the referentiality, the ‘texture’ of motifs and the interconnected meta-level composition of The Neverending Story would be to draw several in-depth comparisons with other texts of juvenile literature, which are extraordinarily prone to the above type of evaluation, mainly due to the axiological charge running through their ‘wiring’. Regrettably, or quite the contrary – without the slightest trace of remorse, I have been drugged by the vision of the ‘platinum’, towards which Ende’s opus magnum is paving way for all the letter profaners and future ‘sentencary’ saints out there. Besides, the book prevents us from judging it in the matter-of-fact assessment mode in the first place, because it has been dosed with the intensity of a full-blooded adult fiction, which tends to fluctuate, multiply and double-cross. We often forget that our protagonist or, shall I say, “protagonists” – for there is another youngster, Bastian’s ‘neverending’ anti-doppelgänger Atreyu (the prefix “anti-” taken very flexibly here) – are preteen fellas, especially when we are witnessing Bux’s metaphysically brilliant conversations with Grograman A.K.A. The Many-Colored Death or his Sisyphean task at the Minroud Mine. On the other hand, Atreyu does not fall behind with his spine-tingling confrontation with a dying werewolf Gmork in Spook City, surrounded by the oncoming Nothing. Their dialog, pumped up with a thinly camouflaged critique of an extensively sprawled ‘short-sightedness’ of our contemporary times (I should have used the term “blindness”, however I side with Atreyu, Bastian and Ende who all think, I presume, that the hope-crushing proposition “Life is like that” is a load of gibberish), makes you shed a tear with a platinum gleam inside. Or is it just a will-o’ the-wispy reflection of a marvelous filigree from the Silver City of Amarganth?

Reflections, ponderings, ruminations – another ‘nook’ of the book; this one reserved for adults and younglings, whose ‘juvenile’ eyes have been already blessed with a platinum insight and ‘outsight’ – form a gallery of thoughts, many of them tuning us in to amusingly speculative frequencies, not to mention lumps in our throats we are struggling to gulp thanks to their humane honesty. Some of our meditations are induced by frame tale narratives, varying from a single paragraph to a regular account, which have been studded throughout the whole book. A memorable example is Bastian’s tale “The Story of the Library of Amarganth”, which leaves us contemplating creative powers of the nomenclature or – if I may meta-wink a little at language myself – ‘the imagery of coinagery’ (when we invent a phrase, is it only a word or is there something more, ‘lurking’ behind this freshly concocted term? If there is something ‘out there’, what is it then? What could it be? Has it been there before? What is the ‘feeling’ of a difference between making up a portmanteau and forming an expression consisting of randomly picked letters? – these questions are only a warm-up, believe me!). Other notions, which are conjured up by the ‘choke-uppers’, the first-class tear jerkers (like Bastian’s stay in the House of Change with Dame Eyola), treat our hearts and souls as musical instruments, on which they play a slow jazz standard that resonates with the most fragile ‘strings’ of ours, which, for a well-known or a well-unknown reason, have been kept hidden, forgotten, ignored, mistrusted. Upon hearing their gentle weeps, we crack as easily as dreams from Minroud Mine. And then we cry as bitterly as Acharis, the ugliest creatures in Fantastica. It is during those moments that our eyes leach away platinum filaments, which forecast fantastic filigrees of forthcoming fonts and firmaments…

I know what all of you may be asking yourselves right now – what is this ‘platinum’ I have been obscurely (or even obtusely) hinting at all along? I am not sure. It may be something as straightforward (but absolutely not trivial!) as a feeling of being boosted by ultimate possibilities, whose unquenchable, child-like energy might still be attainable for everyone, despite the annihilating presence of Nothing. Or it could be something more complicated. For example our sincerest astonishment because we have found something unexpectedly cathartic in a totally unforeseeable place let alone ‘something’ from beyond the inexpressibility, which keeps hovering over neither silver platters of writing nor golden nuggets of silence. Or maybe it is, after all, only an addictive additive, a mirage, an echo, an aftershock of unnecessary letters, which give birth to nothing but a profanity (like the overzealously wordy one you have just read?). Yet tell me, My Dear Platinum-eyed Reader, if it is conceivable for the never-ending divinity of letters to corrupt or get desecrated? And is it possible to forget the story which never ends? I can already sense the shine of your platinum smile…

Amonne Purity

There is no denying that I would enter a vapid land of infertile thought and mundane repetitiveness, were I to elaborate on a well-known fact that out of a countless plethora of books, some are considered rare because of their bewildering exactitude and profundity, while some others, also being an infrequent treat, are like kids playing hopscotch – flawlessly carefree and genuinely unpretentious. However, this obviousness ends rather abruptly when the profundity breeds cement shoes of repulsion and the unpretentiousness gets lost in a distorted mirror image of itself – naivety. Nevertheless, we should not feel abused by these truly disheartening phenomena whatsoever simply because a third, very intermediate type of book might always come in handy as a ‘savior’, who casts off a whiff of disappointment reeking from the previous two. The transitional state of such ‘redeeming’ novels comes from a specific quality which makes them invulnerable to the aforesaid corrosion. Galápagos is surely one of them. But how did it acquire its exceptional ‘stainlessness’ and what are its traits – answering these questions is a quest which awaits the following text.

Galápagos can be regarded, with a slight overuse of oxymora, as a stoic outcry of calm exasperation, how typical of Vonnegut and other authors being thoroughly disillusioned yet somehow still deeply stirred up by a questionable moral constitution of humanity and its probable as well as unforeseeable transformation in the near or far future. Being a twisted blend of dystopian fiction and a clear-cut satire, the book presents a story of an impending end of human race as we know it. Narrated from an incredibly amusing, subjectively omnipresent point of view, which provides another delivery of paradoxical expressions to our humble collection, it follows the retrospective vivisection of accidental events, which resulted in stranding a totally mismatched menagerie of characters on a fictional, northernmost island of the titular Galápagos archipelago – Santa Rosalia. We find among them: an admiral in the Ecuadorian Naval Reserve, who is an all-fingers-and-thumbs socialite of German descent and a sheer figurehead as regards even basic sailing skills, a recently widowed, middle-aged, high school teacher of biology, a blind daughter of a well-off financier – a genuine cross-breed between Gordon Gekko and Steve Fossett, a pregnant wife of a Japanese IT genius and six girls of a cannibalistic Kanka-bono tribe from the Ecuadorian rainforest. By the utterly contingent chain of events, the above motley crew sets sail from Guayaquil’s waterfront amidst the freshly erupted mayhem of the imminent apocalypse.

I am having this dubious sensation right now that Vonnegut – one of the most effortless evokers of the severely depleted supply of common sense ‘stored’ inside the homo sapiens species – might have actually written a perfectly distorted parable. As we are being amused by author’s bitter-sweet, fact-like prose loaded with some gallows humor of the most exquisite quality, we suddenly realize that the funky bunch of our modern Robinsons-to-be, gathered on the “Bahía de Darwin” passenger ship, cannot be actually treated as, in this particular case, the aggregate protagonist at all. It simply could not be one, due to the overbearing power of fatalism sticking out its impish head from behind the text itself. Its influence on the reader seems to be irrevocable to such a great extent, that we are barely able to see the embodiment of the ‘antagonist’ too, namely “the big brains of humans”, ‘whose’ destructive force, an unfortunate result of a superfluous intellectual flexibility homo sapiens has been cursed with, has the earmarks of something absolutely detached from the humans themselves, a thing exterior, almost alien and, what is even more puzzling, completely marginal. This perplexing impression of the ultimate fatalism (maybe the term “catastrophism” would do even better here), emerging as an eerie toss-up between blind chance and fate, is the only element of parable left in the strictly ‘anti-parable-ish’ microcosm of Galápagos. Or is it?

As a matter of fact, it is not. There is another factor, which could be deemed not only an ‘elongated’ moral, appearing gradually as an antithesis of the mischievously predetermined ‘fabric’ of the book, but also something which calls into question my sudden supposition (maybe Galápagos hasn’t been soaking in a marinade of antiparable for that long after all?…). Sprouting probably straight from Vonnegut’s bona fide steadfastness against mindlessness and hopelessness the earthlings have been following and causing throughout their career as the Rulers of the World, it may have something in common with an… optimism! Yes, indeed, the optimism – however ridiculous it may sound, for the prose of our Pall Mall-loving author does not necessarily leave you grinning from ear to ear in a straightforward manner; it’s more like a laughter through tears – which is being hinted along the tale and quite often reassures us that a certain type of redemption always awaits the human race. And it doesn’t matter, whether it turns out to be a result of tossing a coin called “Fate” (another oxymoron to our catalog!) or if it comes from the law of natural selection, which finally does justice and straightens things out a little for the remainder of humanity or, better yet, streamlines it here and there. I cannot restrain myself from listening to the promptings of my oversized brain, which keeps telling me to give my own proposition of the moral. So I say: thank goodness for a devolution! Wait a minute!? Do I hear a squawk of a great frigate bird resembling a laughter?…

In the first paragraph I stated that Galápagos belongs to the intermediate group of novels, which are immune to ‘genetic’ deformations and mutations of those overly thorough(bred) as well as mongrel-ishly happy-go-lucky. I suppose the secret of Vonnegut’s ‘stainlessness’ lies in the qualities of the crooked parable pinned down on an ad hoc basis: the anti-exemplary protagonist, the distilled, almost nominal antagonist, the overgrown, highly imperative fatalism and the moral, which is definitely present, although mercilessly elusive. After all what can one possibly say or write when there has already been said and written almost everything about the self-destructive force of human stupidity? Quoth Beckett: The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle. That’s probably why Vonnegut, I presume, is e.g. dropping sloppy hints of what will the typical specimen of homo (still?) sapiens look like in one million years. Nonetheless, all of this can always be proven wrong (another caprice of the oversized human brain – doubts). Therefore I am leaving the task of dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s up to you and your much less misleading gut instinct. Just remember not to trust your oversized brains too much! They tend to get rusty and, after all, little do we know about how they really work, don’t we?

Amonne Purity

Lautréamont once came up with a comparison of beauty – extremely prophetic for the shape of things to come in the field of art and literature of the 20th century – which says that it is the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. Nowadays, almost 150 years later, in the epoch of titillating multitudes of accelerations, you are reaping the harvest of what this quotation has sowed: the rye of innumerable chimeric theories, the oats of rhetorical fusions and divisions, and the barley of socio-economical constructions, deconstructions, reconstructions as well as many other cultivars of combinatory relations, which names begin with “multi”, “neo” and “post” prefixes. Struggling inside this hectic jungle, your imagination is bound to long for something completely different during those unique and sudden outbursts of its – let’s say – ‘self-awareness’ even more feverishly, ferociously, fiercely than in the era of the author of Songs of Maldoror. In those moments, so much similar to micro-sleep, or rather – micro-awakening, with your eyes purer than the newborn child’s innocence, you dream about ‘deontologizing’ yourself even more to achieve a state of maximum openness, a plasticity of blank slate to imbibe at least one single flicker of The New (you cannot say “something new”, because you would be automatically ‘anchored’ in the being again), which would leave you stunned beyond comprehension. My very own eyes have recently stumbled upon the above mentioned flicker, and now, ultimately enthralled by its unearthly other-worldliness (taken positively here), I am going to try and recreate a symbolic fraction of its magic for you.

Let’s imagine a book which ceases to be a book. Of course it possesses all the physical characteristics a so-called “typical novel” – a spatial object from within the world – should possess: a cover, pages, a spine, a gutter, a flyleaf, a table of contents, a dust jacket, etc. – palpable guarantees of a whole bunch of concrete percepts inside our head. A body of text – this paradoxical, part tangible, part invisible edifice of evanescence – is also there with many magnificent wonders waiting to be discovered, uncovered, recovered by a sharpness of your hawk-eyed sight. However, by means of the unknown, due to the ultimately abstract whatchamacallit from the outside of the outside, thanks to something that transcends even the ‘from-beyondful’ area of sheer speculation, you find yourself more and more absent, imperceptible, non-existent from the ontological point of view, when you are entering the ever-increasing ‘gravitational field’ of If on a winter’s night a traveler. Calvino leads you through his ‘rabbit hole’ where letters literally (‘sentencially’ and ‘paragraphically’ too!) take over the potential of reality to exist per se. No ordinary ‘rabbit hole’ indeed! It is like a combination of Cheshire Cat’s grin, a wormhole, squaring the circle and a dump truck full of the highest possible metaphysical intensity. No sweat, I will show you around!

At first glance (the one that the book allows you to perceive while you are still within your everyday reality), you are nesting yourself inside a story of a bibliophilistic investigation. From the very first page, a certain meta-level narrative, changing swiftly from the second-person to the first-person perspective, somehow splits you into two versions of yourself. The first one is going along the plot and blending in with the body of the novel, while the second is staying outside this freshly conjured inter-dimensional inside (outside?) of you #1 and the book. At the same time, Calvino is hazing you #2 with his dashing reflectivity and smashing vagaries so effectively that it ends up soaring high up into the no man’s land of the unknown, the fresh, The New. Meanwhile, as you #1 is getting upset by the seemingly random set of occurrences, which prevent it from finishing the book it began reading in the opening, you all (the you – the protagonist – from the novel, the you #1 who is reading the novel, and the you #2 who is outside both of you – all three mixed together!) are gradually transforming into a bookworm-ish sleuth, who is entering a ‘reality’ where even calling its arché “something that appears in our universe as if it were ‘oozing’ from letters” simply won’t do any justice at all. What is this ‘reality’ then? Under the circumstances, is it even possible to ask any questions at all?

Trying to whisk off from the obscurity of thought (and of multilocated you’s) as far as I can, I am going to go with the flow of Calvino’s arché. The ‘beyondness’ of ephemeral phenomena emerges when you – an aggregate of replications – are being more and more absorbed in futile attempts to read the novel, which repetitively turns out to be not the one it seems to have been in the first place (as a result of supposed printing flaw, publisher’s alleged red tape, purported takeover of literature due to war turmoil, etc.). The above ‘beyondness’ must have been probably grounded in… the indescribability of silence! The moment you (still as a bunch of reproductions, each one on a different level of the novel, yet somehow intertwined together!) succumb to machinations performed by some elusive, spy-like fanatic, whose aim is to overflow the world with double-bogus novels in which a fake artificiality doesn’t reveal the truth – it just squares the falsehood, leaves you speechless owing to the pristine quality of ‘primordial’ experience all three of you’s combined together are exposed to. It seems almost like you have been permitted to witness God’s breath preceding one of the most symbolically powerful utterances of all time: “In the Beginning was the Word.” Your simultaneous outburst of sudden awareness, enlightening consciousness, transcendental revelation of how many more possibilities are condensed in the…hmm… ‘spatiality-to-be’ of letters in general, what kind of potential relations can they conceive as a wild variety of functions, means, meanings, interactions, intersections, etc. – all of this, taken as some kind of new, unnamable ‘poli-wholeness’, enters a circulatory system of your spirit. Shortly after this infusion, you know, without the slightest trace of uncertainty or doubt, that you have just set out on an astonishing journey throughout the kaleidoscope of endless phantasmagorical alternatives and portmanteau qualities!

Coming back to our good old universe, Calvino’s diamond, being the novel about reading a novel, presents a characteristic cut of self-reference that reacts with The New in a spectacular combustion, leaving you hungry for answers to loads of intriguing questions. In what way apocrypha can broaden the sense of writer’s identity? What can be distinguished as an essence of a difference between a negative fact and a positive fact? To what extent a heteronymous mode of writing can alter concepts of difference and multiplication? Are we able to detail a mutual inspiration of philosophy and literature? These and many more brain-racking issues await all of you out there, whose eyes are sparkling with the yearning for the ultimate escape during those scarce moments of the micro-awakening I mentioned in the first paragraph. Personally, I have never been taken so far away by any other book of such a conceptual charge. What’s more, I have never roamed around the outback of the metaphysical speculation regarding a ternary association “writing-language-reality” that long. Only Nabokov’s Pale Fire was inflammable enough to set me off in quite a similar manner inside this boundless realm, however it is a whole different story…

If on a winter’s night a traveler, which in virtually no time has become my personal favorite to win the “What book would you take with you on a desert island?” contest, is truly a jewel in the crown, which has been richly incrusted with many precious, postmodern stones, mainly during the second half of the XX century. The jewel so brilliant, it would outshine even those of Lautréamont’s abstract comparisons of beauty, which he had never managed to pen. You should feel lucky that the gemstone mine called “Literature” still not only gives evidence that its deposits are far from depletion, but also sets up new directions for all sorts of miners to boldly dig, drill and sift where no prospector has dug, drilled and sifted before. So you’d better pack your pick into the bag, steal some drills from the nearby DIY store and retrieve a sieve from your neighbor’s tool shed – the mine is waiting. But first, don’t forget to fuel your safety lamp with the beautiful, everlasting shine of Calvino’s grandest ornament!

Amonne Purity

With the successful release of the film Hidden Figures and being that it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 launch disaster, I figured that I’d start 2017 with a switch to non-fiction, focusing on the critically acclaimed The Right Stuff by the New Journalism pioneer and provocateur Tom Wolfe.  When the book was released in 1979, America’s self-confidence was at a nadir.  The Watergate scandal and resignation of the president in 1974 shook people’s confidence in many of the country’s institutions; the country had retreated from Vietnam in 1975; and stagflation and the oil shortage were ravaging the economy.  The book however takes a spotlight to a more optimistic time when the space race between the country and the Soviet Union caught the world’s imagination.  The narrative, stretching from the end of the Korean War to the end of the Mercury program, reveals the trials and the triumphs of the U.S space program.

What is “the right stuff” that Wolfe speaks of throughout the book?  The candidates for the Mercury missions are fighter pilots picked from various branches of the military.  These are men with a devil-may-care attitude, with the exception of the late “boy scout poster boy” John Glenn, who is both idolized and teased by his fellow astronauts.  They drive fast and fly dangerously, seeking new thrills while trying to maintain and improve their standing in the military.  “The right stuff” is the physical and mental courage and resilience needed to not screw up when performing their duties, whether in the military, or later in the space program.  Those who don’t have “the right stuff” flame out, likely harming their career prospects in the process.  Even when the candidates are narrowed down and selected for the sub-orbital and orbital flights that entail the Mercury missions, will their mettle allow them to keep this resilience as they embark to places where only a few Russians have gone before?  Even though it’s non-fiction, the book, just like a novel, tries to keep the reader excited for what happens next, as the astronauts’ varied personalities clash with each other and affect their dealings with the outside world.

Wolfe’s narrative shows that space program wasn’t all fireworks and ticker-tape parades, although it included these, especially after a successful mission.  It was messy, political, and a bureaucratic nightmare.  In the early years of space exploration research, there was even some controversy over even the status of NASA. Initially, the space program was an extension of the military branches, particularly of the U.S. Air Force.  Then it went under civilian control.  However, military officers are the men fed into the program.  And still there are national security concerns.  If the Soviets won the space race, would they be in a position to rain nuclear bombs down on the U.S. and their allies?  What if they established a base on the moon?  Vice-President Lyndon Johnson states that “he doesn’t want to go to bed underneath a communist moon.”  And neither does the rest of the country.  So, the Kennedy administration declares in what could be called his unofficial redo of his inaugural address the goal of sending a man to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.  As history shows, this was accomplished, though Kennedy himself did not live to see it.

Though the descriptions of the launches, flights, and returns are interesting, especially in their most harrowing moments, some of the most illuminating incidents in the book revolve around the background stories: the astronauts’ families, sudden celebrity, and the eclipsing of fame of previous astronauts when new achievements are celebrated.  The astronauts’ families are supposed to shine out before the media lens as examples of the perfect middle-class household.  But they are human like the rest of us, and occasionally, the cracks and flaws are exhibited to the world, often to the government’s chagrin.  A notable example involves the wife of John Glenn, Annie.  She had a severe stutter for the majority of her life.  Unfortunately for her, the media wanted to get insights from the astronauts’ wives, especially immediately prior and during their husbands’ launches into orbit.  During John’s launch sequence, there were some worries about potential issues, which lead to a media firestorm.  It didn’t help that Lyndon Johnson wanted to insert himself into the situation as a potential comforter to Annie.  However, she wouldn’t step outside to face the cameras, nor would she allow the vice-president inside her home to schmooze for the media outlets.  The only person she was comfortable with was her and John’s assigned reporter for Life.  John knew that his wife had extreme reticence speaking before an audience with that stammer of hers.  So, he makes a firm stand explaining that if his wife is uncomfortable, she doesn’t have to be interviewed, even by Johnson.  This flusters the media and leaves Johnson fuming over being shut down.  Pondering the narrative, one can just imagine the expressions on their faces.

In 2017, the Soviet Union has broken up, there is an international space station where nations cooperate with other, and much of current space exploration is being funded by private enterprises.  There have been great changes since the apex of the space race in the 1960s.  However, to see where the future of space exploration can take us, it’s good to look back at the past, especially at the mistakes, to see what needs to be corrected.  However, it’s also beneficial to look at the achievements.  These men of the Mercury program were pioneers of what is now, though much is now diminished in certain areas.  They were not scientists, but as they advanced through the program they had to perform their given tasks like scientists while maintaining the critical edge of “the right stuff” typical of brash fighter pilots.  Some ended up paying with their lives, like Gus Grissom, who perished with two other astronauts during the launch sequence of Apollo 1.  Others, such as John Glenn, lived fulfilling public and private lives long after they qualified to blast off into orbit and beyond.  But all these space warriors had heart and “the right stuff.”  That’s something to cheer. 

Pride in one’s art is usually encouraged, but what if one’s art supported a cause or a thought process that’s no longer in favor or that has even become denigrated?  Is the art to be thrown out completely as suspect, or can one admire the skill and technique of the artist, while questioning the themes represented?  This is one of the main themes of An Artist of the Floating World.  And as with many other literary novels, there are no easy answers when confronting such questions.  

Born of Japanese parents, Ishiguro moved to the U.K. when he was five.  He was brought up with Japanese cultural values, but his relationship with Japan is complex. During his early years, his reading and writing were more influenced by British writers than Japanese ones.  This second novel, like his first published four years before, centers around Japanese characters; however, the style reflects those of his contemporaries in the British literary world of the 1980s.  In fact, Ishiguro wouldn’t return to Japan until three years after this novel’s publication.  So, his literary Japan is one based off of recollections from his parents, with imagination filling the gaps.  Still, the novel captures the feelings of the period accurately when comparing it with history.   

The novel, set in postwar Japan, follows Masuji Ono as he deals with the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II.  He lost his wife in one of the last bombing raids of the war, and is now trying to arrange the marriage of his youngest daughter Noriko.  There’s a dilemma however beyond trying to cope as a widower in a country trying to rebuild.  Ono had a career as a successful artist decades before the war.  During the 1930s, he however attached himself to the growing militaristic spirit of Imperial Japan.  Once a painter of scenes of frivolity in the pleasure quarters of the city, he turned to painting political propaganda pieces after observing the poverty afflicting the country.  This lead to a break with the artistic tradition that he was taught.  At the height of Japanese conquests, he was held in esteem by the people and the government.  With Japan’s defeat, his reputation is now in tatters, and he is held at a distance like a leper by many.  The new ethos of democracy has supplanted the old imperial creed, and he increasingly seems to be a relict by his daughters and in-laws.

One of Ono’s primary struggles is finding a husband for that youngest daughter.  Noriko is a woman in her mid-twenties, and she is steadily marching towards old maid-status according to the culture and period.  Ono has a feeling that his role as an Imperial propagandist has hindered families from completing a match between their sons and his daughter.  When the novel begins, one finds that a hopeful match had suddenly collapsed the year before, and Ono is nervous whether the current match will follow a similar pattern, especially if the family looks deeply into his past.  Ono tries not to be ashamed of his past, but he knows that it has not only affected his daughter’s prospects, but his relationships with many of his past associates.  During wartime, Ono served the government not only as a propagandist, but also as an informer against those artists expressing sentiments not in accord with the manifest destiny of the Japanese Empire.  As those artists’ reputations are being rehabilitated postwar, his reputation has fallen due to individuals in the art world and government viewing him as a stooge of the militaristic regime.

Ono also has to deal with changes beyond the political culture.  Because of the promotion of democracy, attitudes toward the elderly have changed too.  Not that the younger generation is disrespectful to their elders, but they increasingly believe that new mores should be given a chance.  This is seen in the contrasting situations where Ono deals with his grandson Ichiro and the way Ichiro’s mother Setsuko handles him.  It seems that Ono is confused by Ichiro’s playful imitation of Western media characters, but Setsuko approves that Ichiro prefers Western heroes to the figures of Japanese history and legend.  His daughters’ husbands profess similar admiration for the values promoted by the American Occupation, and this includes supporting the dismissal of senior staff in the corporate world who could’ve been tainted by the wartime ethos.  As deference for one’s elders is part of traditional Japanese culture, Ono is confused by the wholesale rejection of everything prewar, and thinks it not entirely necessary, even though he realizes that Japan must admit responsibility for the war.  Whether Ono finds himself responsible for some of the negativity associated with the period is still a mystery by the end of the novel, as he vacillates between opinions concerning his importance during wartime and whether all his art was nefarious when he promoted the war effort.

While the novel is definitely not a beach-read, it’s perfect for those who want something brief, but who don’t want to feel like they wasted their time on something with ephemeral value.  Though not much external action takes place, it doesn’t feel like the characters are static.  The restraint in the characters’ behavior often tells much more about their feelings and motivations.  Because Ono is a flawed character, the reader sympathizes with him somewhat.  Not that one agrees with his wartime career choices, but one believes that he sincerely believed that he was doing right.  What the reader may have a problem with is Ono’s failure to acknowledge that the postwar reevaluation of expansionist mindset is perhaps closer to truth than his sincere wartime beliefs despite his associates and family prodding him in that direction.  It’s not that Ono is a monster; he seems to be a kind family man, willing to yield in a number of matters.  It’s that he is blind concerning aspects of his past, and this blindness is likely deliberate because those aspects may call into question his integrity as an artist. 

The following text is a result of taking a deliberate plunge into absorbing waters of the Gun, with Occasional Music River. As one may suspect, the word “deliberate” suggests that the book I have recently decided to tame – this time not only with eyes full of deliberation but also with a reservoir of letters and sentences – should definitely be labelled with a touch of chipped linguistic playfulness as “The liberation from choice”, traceable at least in three tributaries which could be found in the novel’s catchment: the reader, the protagonist’s reality and the whole text itself. The first one was sourced from a grasping blend of baby blue runs of narrative’s lightness and turquoise rapids of flawless generic duality: hardboiled detective fiction and Philip K. Dick’s soft sci-fi influences, all of which are nothing but dashing appearances of the third tributary itself. In other words, the waters which had evaporated with all the possible and impossible reflections and gleams from the main stem of Jonathan Lethem’s debut novel, replenished the spring of my little brook and carved its mouth in the shape of the ensuing text. But what about the second tributary? What does it actually look like and how does it affect the remaining two?

Set in an undisclosed future, Gun, with Occasional Music tells a story of Conrad Metcalf, a worn-out, smart-mouthed private inquisitor in his early forties, who is always very fond of snorting one too many of his favorite make lines to get things going as well as throwing in cheeky, one-line metaphors and retorts while talking with someone, especially women and shady-looking individuals. Metcalf strongly resembles a future incarnation of Raymond Chandler’s best-known character – Philip Marlowe – however the former is enriched by some postmodern ‘uncertainties’. For instance, one day our ‘private inquisi-dick’ exchanged nerve endings of his genital area with his then girlfriend in order to broaden their sexual experiences. Unfortunately, his other half fled unexpectedly, leaving his privates still very private and fully operational (as the flesh without nerves can only be), although totally devoid of an ability to provide him with male sexual sensations. Having been shattered by the dismantling sex swap, Metcalf took a self-imposed vow of celibacy and decided to fool around with drugs instead, only to find himself ridden with an inflamed misogynistic resentment and a general rudeness of his character which has been counterbalanced by a strangely twisted persistence and an inner inclination to help lost souls get back on their feet.

Even though the protagonist’s sophisticated existence might evoke images of skillfully crafted characters from many other novels, it is only the world we are witnessing through Lethem’s first-person narrative that leaves us with nothing but the necessity to bow to the mastery of its construction. The author – using linguistic concision or even condensation which, on the other hand, should never be regarded as deprived of an articulate yet pleasantly rough-edged flow – depicts a dystopian reality with children turned into so-called “babyheads” – a gloomy result of some universally implemented intelligence enhancement therapy, the very same which made all the animals stand upright, use language and behave like people in general. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The whole society is alienated so extensively and intensively that asking about somebody’s personal life is considered a sign of outrageous impoliteness (each case is therefore an exceptionally tough nut to crack for every private inquisitor, provided they are hired by anyone at all), the printed word is prohibited (Metcalf is watching “Oakland Photographic”) and psychology has been downgraded from science to itinerant, proselytizing religion. Not to mention the fact that almost everybody is addicted to legally sold drugs which alter human psychosomatic balance on purpose (for example, if you snort a few lines of forgettol, you can kiss your short and long-term memory goodbye for the rest of the evening). Karma points also play a crucial role in everyday life, being an official indicator of resourcefulness as well as justification for continuity of individual’s existence (if your karma level drops to zero, you are sentenced to hibernation). Astonishingly, all of these civilizational ‘marvels’ are fused with the rest of the hard-boiled features so naturally that it is almost impossible to perceive them as something disturbingly bizarre at all. Lethem’s writing skills are on a par with Dick’s ability to merge even the most ridiculous elements and concepts with the background reality. He strips their strangeness away and leaves them covered only in a thin layer of ‘invisible normality’, the trait expressed, for instance, by intelligent coin-operated household appliances and doors in Ubik which threaten to commence legal proceedings against every individual stupid enough to use them improperly or hack their CPU’s.

Focusing attention on this ‘unintentional’ world which is, in my humble opinion, far from wearing a badge of symbolic critique of contemporary times (however, it is getting harder to defend the above statement after reading the second part of Gun…), there can be traced one deliberate aspect of it after all. “The liberation from choice”, mentioned in the first paragraph, an idea which neither serves as an example to construct a thorough (or lightweight) assessment of the present-day condition of mankind nor possesses the ability to prove, envision or justify anything. It is more like an abutment which is hatching its bridges – spanning the third tributary in many unrecognizable dimensions – and lurking somewhere between (or rather ‘behind’) the lines of protagonist’s reality like some mysterious specter, dressed in a delicate unobtrusive conceptual superficiality. When we are co-investigating the murder case along with Metcalf, it suddenly overflows us and we know that we – as readers – ‘overflow’ it too. And our stream beds are beginning to convert into the unavoidable, the necessity of words and sentences to simply be written down…

My little brook formed an estuary in the shape of this review. It had no choice – it was liberated by reaching a confluence of itself and inevitable meanders of the Gun, with Occasional Music River, bristled with an infinite number of bridges like a non-existent mythical hedgehog or a porcupine made out of three elements – water, concrete and steel – which are not what they seem. What would your and Jonathan Lethem’s confluence look like?

Amonne Purity

There have been written many books which chief attempts as novels were to encapsulate more or less overwhelming but, nevertheless, entrancing slices of a vast and astonishing variety of incarnations of and inclinations towards (outwards and inwards too!) the leitmotif of loneliness. Apart from the evident ones like Nausea or Steppenwolf and those still not as obvious in their ‘outsider-ish’ nature as they might seem on second thought, e.g. Breakfast of Champions, Solaris or A Clockwork Orange, the reader is somehow destined to occasionally stumble upon a text which embodies solitude of a spotless, almost pristine quality. This trait of aloneness could be borne by any component of the novel: characters, the genuineness of a plot, author’s prowess of camouflaging archetypes and symbols, the impact of writing’s ‘spirit’ which is being felt most vividly after turning the last page, the ease of juggling concepts and ideas that have been smuggled between the lines and passages of the narrative, etc. In American Psycho it is the protagonist – Patrick Bateman – and his ostensibly invisible, immaculate alienation.

One might speculate that only the purest and least unique form of everyday loneliness remains unnoticed. It possesses this peculiar attribute of the impossibility to attract any attention towards people who have been affected by its powers of concealment. They simply stay in the shadows as if being dressed in an exclusive cloak of imperceptibility. The so-called “impeccable loners” are ‘unattractive’ – as it may be wittily but not quite correctly said – yet, evidently, the unobtrusive nature of some types of perfect remoteness they epitomize (which, as probably everything, varies unimaginably between its own ‘subspecies’) could be characterized as being shrouded in double-edged colors. Let’s imagine desolation so unambiguous in its essence, surrounded by the mirror images of its alienated self, that it distinctly undermines the seemingly easy-to-determine, explicit type of aloneness it represents. In such a case, paradoxically, the hermit becomes so public, that he/she is pushed even deeper down into his/her existential ‘solitary confinement’. The recluse’s obscurity begins to shine and all the edges of his/her shadows, shades and silhouettes are visible so blatantly that their sudden crystal clear and razor-sharp appearances succumb to even greater indistinctness, leaving the loner in a state of progressive, bunker-like unreachability. This is exactly what is happening to Patrick Bateman or what we are supposed to believe is happening to him throughout the novel.

Bateman – the focal point of a graphic narrative, embroidered with a stream-of-consciousness seam – is one of the most intact hermits out in the vast realm of literature. Being brainwashed by extensive encyclopedic knowledge (manifesting itself with almost obsessive-compulsive intensity mainly during pointless conversations with his peers from work about wardrobe what-to-do’s and what-to-don’ts) and utterly overmannered by a stodgy cocktail of courteous soullessness of the late-capitalistic upper class of Wall Street yuppies, he continuously builds his ‘fortress of solitude’. It serves him as a deceptively effective stepping stone from a mundane, unchangeable reality of haute couture suits, designer labelled suspenders, horn-rimmed glasses, slicked back hairstyles, meaningless dinners at fancy Zagat-recommended restaurants and coke-snorting parties in clubs stricken with people as hollow and shallow as he is himself. Unfortunately (or fortunately – what does it mean ‘to judge’ anyway?) the ramparts of his ‘castle’ are erected by deeds and actions which even one of the least promising and talented apprentices of Duke of Blangis and his fellow libertine comrades from De Sade’s one and only 120 Days of Sodom wouldn’t feel ashamed of. Animal abuse, rape, murder, mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism – these are the monstrous products of our mentally deranged, bloodthirsty protagonist. With every atrocity committed (the strain they inflict on reader’s perception of the character makes it relatively irrelevant whether one has or hasn’t actually been committed – after all, the moat has been deepened, the walls of the turrets – thickened, and the arrow loops – contracted), Bateman is descending into unfathomable desolation without the slightest chance to get away from the self-perpetuating repercussions of being trapped in the continuity of nothingness which almost palpably leers at him from every possible angle. The vicious circle of this everlasting void, combined with futile attempts to interact with at least one person from his surroundings which could be regarded as deprived of the stigma of emptiness (the best candidate for this title is Bateman’s secretary – Jean), leads to nothing but even more rampages.

Bateman’s ‘anti-relational’ and pointless lifestyle of conspicuous consumerism among his “copies” (the whole yuppie clique doesn’t often recognize its members and they’re having a difficulty in identifying each other) sharpens the paradoxical character of his seclusion. So long as he has to be dependent on the officially acceptable code of conduct during each and every social situation (apart from his homicidal outbursts) which he loathes inexpressibly for their absolute futility, Bateman, being quite clear-headed and logical in his behavior (at least for a purported/definite insane maniac…), secretly longs for a world in which he could find some sort of sense. Unfortunately, being rejected by its unrepairable lack of wish for mutual understanding and a hegemony of pretentious heartlessness, his only option to cope with the abysmal void of being ‘outside’ everything is to go berserk from time to time and chop to bits one or two ‘elements’ of his aimless reality. However, this heinousness doesn’t lead to any sensible outcome. On the contrary, it drags Bateman deeper into his gradually omnipresent derangement and make him cling to the destructive madness as well as cancerous society that the reader feels he should immediately abandon. Regrettably, the more he is out, the more he is in. And his seclusion becomes visible as if it was served on a silver platter situated halfway between Holden Caulfield’s ‘state’ of being temporarily forlorn by reality and K.’s (from Kafka’s The Trial) dearth of any contact points with the world apart from the ones that make him a puppet in the hands of the master – the sheer absurd.

American Psycho, the book which is evidently open to many interpretations, shows not only how far people from the late 80’s Big Apple went astray handling the social reality (or rather: losing a grip on it), but it is also one of the most shattering studies of being ‘abandoned’ and coming to an end inside some dark cul-de-sac of radiating solitude. All in all, I guess it would be a very arduous task to extricate an answer from the jungle of suppositions regarding causes of Patrick Bateman’s alienation. It would look as spotless as suits our sociopath is wearing to work anyway… Besides, who would want to go over and over the loneliness issue, when there is much more to discover in Ellis’ unquestionable masterpiece? I wouldn’t, but it’s not my turn to investigate. It’s yours. And don’t worry about finding nothing and feeling lonely. You can always count on Bateman…

Amonne Purity