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/
PART ONE
“Gusts of wind barely warmed by July drove the rain aslant…”
Barely July today, by the skin of my teeth, as I learn about this mid 20th century man called Wilditch, (called WW in an old school article like Jacobs?) diagnosed barely terminal, diagnosed by well-characterised doctors, all in a prose beautifully stylish, but it is potentially or vaguely bad news that WW takes stoically, and he goes to make a rare visit to his old boyhood house near Colchester (the town, the oldest recorded one in England, where I myself was born), a house his brother now lives in, WW now having memories of his mother who was against ‘silly fancies’, and his writing ventures as a boy, of exploring the island in the house’s lake – a bit inspired by Treasure Island – and what he once found under the garden. That’s where I will leave you to other people’s spoilers, spoilers that I hope to avoid heretofore.
But is WW really dying? A fey story, if not a fairy one? One about a dream as well as real life? And a dream, it is contended, is an experience as much as any part of life.
And I was rather shocked by the word ‘well’ being added to this statement…
“…he had never learnt how to drive a car well.”
Beware Spoilers and Rogues
PART TWO
1 – 4
“Scrawled with the simplicity of ancient man upon the left-hand wall of the passage – done with a sharp tool like a chisel – was the outline of a gigantic fish.”
Is it a Tench?
These chapters remind me strongly of John Cowper Powys as we follow WW (one moit (a word used in the text) himself as a child dreaming and the other moit himself now older, in terminal illness, remembering real events as a child under the garden), a mix of Long John Silver and Robinson Crusoe, and finding first this fish and a newspaper (Colchester Guardian) from fifty years before smelling of fish, and an oldish man sitting on a decorative lavatory seat (except there is a pit underneath) and his quacking wife. Make sense? IT DOES IN THE BOOK. The man reminds me of Trump tweeting from his throne and his daughter (Ivanka?) anachronistically being a beauty queen her father fancies in a magazine. WW is given a golden po to piss in, meanwhile, there are many wise saws and homilies in this work. A major discovery for me. It means more than it means. It’s about life – and death. Can’t yet imagine where it might be going….
A stench, then, not a Tench.
PART TWO
5 – 7
PART THREE
“The gold of dreams is not the diluted gold of even the best goldsmith, there are no diamonds in dreams made of paste — what seems is. ‘Who seems most kingly is the king.'”
There is so much oblique wisdom in this book, more powerful than standard wisdom; the curiosity of Carroll now explicitly becomes curiouser here : the ‘curiosity growing inside him like cancer.’ The gold po now found in older life with flaky yellow paint. And past life something that needs re-interpreting, a quest for Miss Ramsgate (that beauty queen from that magazine of Javitt the old man on his loo-pan, not to mention Javitt’s kwahking ‘wife’ Maria). But equally such obliquity gives hope to those of us at the ends of our lives. A miracle of literature. Only madness will suffice. The sort of madness that seems and thus is. The stuff, not the paste, that dreams are mad on.
“‘Do you like black skin, Master William?’
‘I suppose at one time or another I’ve been fond of black skin.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d win a beauty prize,’ Ernest said.
‘Do you know Ramsgate, Ernest?'”
end
“But sometimes you find someone who wants things different, who’s tired of all the plus signs and wants to find zero,”
Cf The Zeroist Group I founded in 1967.
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