RAPHUS PRESS MMXVIII
The Mendicant of the Books by Octave Uzanne
The Dream by Ramon Lasalle
The Transgression by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
Red Buried Memory by Jonathan Wood
The Itinerant follows me by Jonathan Wood
Whenever I reviews these works, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
First discrete publication shown above : A stylish, quality chapbook-sized tome beautifully designed and generously illustrated. Translucent end papers. Over 30 pages. Mine is numbered 30/32.
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THE DREAM by Ramon Lasalle
“: the Book first appeared as a vague foreboding,…”
A tantalisingly veiled vignette of this very book? No, more one of its atlas-located ground zero as a dark archetype.
THE TRANSGRESSION by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
“In the centre of that dead and deformed house, which one day might have been normal, a huge set of shelves formed the letter ‘s’.”
This story and thus this whole book itself catches tantamount alight by dint of its individually chosen frontispiece for its thief’s transgression that leads to ironic progression with such cleansing, cleansing it of himself.
My other reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/alcebiades-diniz-miguel/
RED BURIED MEMORY by Jonathan Wood
“I have teeth around my neck and behind my beard and I cannot say anymore but that the moon eventually went down and the sun rose again to herald the waste and the filth and the residue of the squalor of the human spirit turned on its head and sent back down the road to its abortion.”
A farmer and his land, recalling his “perpetual companion” of yore, the book he is now in by dint of the heady prose of Wood, as mirror and vice versa, and the recurring barber who sculpts his beard. I felt rust to my very
soul, reading this, embalmed by excrement or “agricultural run-off.” This book’s outer cover is thinly textured ‘red buried memory’ that surrounds this hessian narration within. An inherited barely physical archetype. It remembers who wrote this; I feel his decline in in my bones, ingrowing like a rotten loop of earth’s mulchy, crusty conundrum.
My previous reviews of this author are linked from https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-new-fate-by-jonathan-wood/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jonathan-wood/
by Octave Usanne (1878)
Translated by Alcebiades Miguel Diniz
I am horrified, yet miraculously entranced by this portrait, nay, this caricature, what else can it be? It is me, the gestalt real-time reviewer of books in nightmarish garb, with all the imputed motives and mendacity of the mendicant of books, a mendicant wielding a semi-religious masquerade of literary self-aggrandisement by sapping off others’ books, and much more I recognise … well, you must read it for yourself. It is mesmerically written and convincingly self-harming. Seriously. And I will not easily recover my equilibrium. Other than by deeming it to be fiction and, indeed, even such burningly great fiction cannot actually be true, I insist. Otherwise, this book itself would burn, threaded as it is by the ridged vein of a watermark that seeps my slowly rusting blood – and tagged by an inflammable fuse.
Still, having slept on it, I see my particular role as mendicant of books is also to provide their holistic medicine for mending, to show their positive strands, healing and hawling them, fetching them into further public profile. And, above all, I BUY, never beg, all the books I want to read or review!
RAPHUS PRESS PAMPHLET SERIES, Volume 04 – MMXVIII
The Itinerant follows me by Jonathan Wood
“, I move off without offering him a light,”
After the Mendicant I now follow the Itinerant, and the fuse is still to be lit – but a light is not offered. Just this cool monochrome of last century’s trains, or this century’s, late.
No red-burning coal to stoke. Only choking apples to redden the cheeks.
I will follow, indeed, this typically crafted Woodian prose into stoicism, into acceptance of encroaching horse-hearsed death … the purple car’s apples, notwithstanding. Posterity will be each horse’s plume. And Itinerants themselves will then follow – in “some different kind of Time.”
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