Des Lewis will be 77 years old on 18 January 2025
Those who have read these episodic brainstorming reviews of mine must know they are very personal — rough-shod and spontaneous. Synchronicity and anagram mixed. I know they are not professional, never potentially publishable other than in the madness of my head, but I do hope they show grains of dark truth and cosmic panache.
These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
To any current genre author I have reviewed before — if you have a new story recently published or soon to be published in a collection or anthology, you may have a review by me of the story that also showcases where it is published. See HERE. (This is because I am no longer well enough to review as many books as I once did.)
Fresh Fictions, free to read HERE.
No AI input in preparation of my texts whatsoever.
THE NEW NONSCENIC
Photos here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/d-f-lewis-recent-photos-1/
Luxurious Mount Abraxas book, as ever in its ten inch by ten inch format, artwork etc.
My copy numbered 5/155
40 pages plus six page insert as shown:
Pages 7 – 22
“He apologised to a woman whose perambulator he collided with.”
It seems appropriate, even meaningful, that about an hour ago I finished another work by this author in a different book about a different place (here). It contained a character called Iain who reminds me of the self-felt ghostly attenuation of Sorin here in the Howardian running genius loci of Steaua de Munte in Romania, around the time of the League of Nations and photographs being taken of almost ignorable giant airships floating over the crowds at Wembley (not far from Wycombe?) in distant England, where Sorin has a pen friend, also called David!
This is a genuinely ungraspable Chinese Whisper of a plot, like that airship, even this sturdy luxurious book it’s held within like air in an airship, as Sorin inadvertently creates a rumour stemming from England of a ‘visit’ from a famous writer, one that I suspect will be become a reality, if, like Sorin, an attenuated ghostly one, to some eyes and other points of view of the family to which Sorin belongs, vanished libraries and perhaps nebulous bookshops, and other jobs where the family name appears, feuds and family connections underpinning much of Steaua…a ‘visit’ that might have some bearing on the whole concertina or domino rally of history in Romania, I wonder? The lemonade, notwithstanding. And the King’s brylcreem.
Page 22 – 36
“From up here, I would say that Europe is around me.”
And the English writer’s visit is also timely for our own times, I guess. We should insist it did go ahead, in the way the newspaper, as primary source, that we see Sorin reading, attests.
This is an aesthetically delightful book and, by dint of an uncertain meeting of minds, and of restaurant entertaining, it contains a highly poignant work. A network of truth as alternative fact, or vice versa. And the actual, incontrovertible meeting of Sorin with the eldest of his family in Steaua, a hundred year old lady, attests more than we can attest ourselves, and which may also have bearing on who was in that pram with which he earlier was said to collide. Or who was pushing it?
This book describes itself as chasing a phantom. Until you the reader become the phantom, and the book a literary primacy of integral source that so sturdily keeps you as its bijou content. Or cover embossing.
“When the least is said, more ways are left open.”
end
Abraxas, Abrexit