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/
SICKNESS by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
“The rot, however, had its nuances,…”
A portrait of family man’s sense of rot’s reek and how it had changed – or rather not changed – throughout his life: childhood crossroadkill, Christ’s cross killing, the sugar plantation work, and now his own inferred death within sound of his wife and children. Yet while computers can recreate virtually anything only words such as these can truly create such reek in the word-textured mind as well as in the virtual nose, even more so than a real reek.
“…unique aromas, pungent moments, variations.”
THE ORIGINS by Lima Barreto
“Because I was a believer in my hopeless inability to deal with ladies of all sorts,…”
and my inability to grasp this text, the first defeat in my life of real-time reviewing. It was as if I understood every word without understanding anything it said when strung together. A sort of sickness in itself. I understood his unease with women, his determination not to fit the logic of generational nature and not to take on the faults of his forebears, and his stubbornness or anti-ideals in his education and the ‘folded paper’ qualification. Clutching at straws. And the pension hotel when he eventually meets the girl his dying wife once or later told him to develop into words. Or was that very girl his wife when younger? I shall never know. A word-sickness at last. I need to experience such an origin of my senile dementia before this dementia fully takes over and erases itself from my knowledge of it as dementia. Too late, perhaps, as I reread what I have just written about such origins. Origin after origin as if they never were. Yes, too late.