My previous reviews of MOUNT ABRAXAS books HERE
When I review this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
GAS – Eric Stener Carlson
DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS: I’m gettin great hawlin here.
Established 2008 — Please use this septuagenarian reviewer’s 'Navigation & Backstory’ shown in the top pinned post of this site — Books chosen carefully by buying them, and review copies not accepted.
Luxurious, very tall, slender, hard-shouldered, stiff-pages bending back with swellings of paper and wonderful noises in the spine, razor-sharp dust-jacket, pure red marker ribbon, decorated with artwork at either end, 48 pages, 115 copies, three stories, the first one being…
gas
“When they’d fed out all the string, they’d held onto the end of it, the little kite invisible above them,”
A deeply poignant story of a man doing his best for his daughter, a rarefiction during an indeterminate period of mass poverty and ruthless landlords in Buenos Aires, comprising lengths of string for both playful kites and rituals of messages from the dead. To put the warmth from gas back in the pipes at least for a day. Gas and, with it, whose guilt? Only gradually do we realise his full circumstances and the even fuller circle of one razor blade out of two … a reading experience and a half, one that will surely tug at your heartstrings. And I don’t mean that lightly.
Children’s Hospital
“It don’t matter if they’re sellin’ a kilo of tomatoes from a wooden crate or a bunch of stolen lingerie spread out on a woolen blanket, they’re always shoutin’ , ‘Everything’ for a pee-soo!’”
…which makes a telling link of a peso between the previous Buenos Aires story and this one. This second work is a very poignant told tale within a tale by a blind old man, about his blindness’ smell of things such as a children’s cancer ward and about the incomparability of mother love, perhaps questionable mother love under the blindness of natural darkness but utterly meaningful mother love nevertheless. Another tale that induces on-going emotional post-appraisal.
Above cross-referenced with ‘f/8’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/i-will-surround-you-conrad-williams/#comment-10983
CITY OF GOD
“There was a smell of fresh baked bread in the air and a little rain.”
In the context of this gestalt’s tall, hard, slender book of pages, ‘City of God’, a seeming random marginalia, is a short story — starting with a sort of ad-hoc-interruptus of a Socratic Dialogue in Buenos Aires between the instinctive, but seemingly glib, modernspeak of a young student and his Professor of some maturity and distinction who also happens to be father of a young baby — a story that ends up as a genuinely and seriously startling literary classic that, if I here told you why it is, would spoil it. Rest assured, though, I will be behind you invisibly as you read it so as to watch your reaction.
Meanwhile, as an aside, I hope this Gestalt review website of mine will soon become the centre of the web itself.
end
Cross-referenced this book here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/world-muses-rhys-hughes/#comment-11011