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 – SUBURBIA
Pages 19 – 24
Just skimmed into the start by only a few pages, but read each page as closely as they deserve, and I’m already on board for the whole ride with the narrator, after his meeting with someone called Weasel. At first this work so far has reminded me of J.W. Böhm’s slow ride (reviewed by me here) around my own Wounded Island during Brexit times, but I note this Thompson work was written well in advance of the dreaded Referendum. But then I noticed a pub that could have come straight from Rhys Hughes’ Deep Absurdism, and I noticed other mythic layers and a turn of mind or tone that could be somehow reviewing the Gestalt Real-Time Reviewer as an entity itself! To show what I mean, I shall make some sizeable quotes from these initial pages, if I may be forgiven. I won’t continue this practice so heavily as I conduct my rhyde proper through this obviously potential seminal book. The dead bleeding deer upon my pilgrim back, notwithstanding.
“Because this is how it always is at the end, the selfishness made manifest, the isolation devices, the rash of rush and bluster.”
“…the notion that we are all dead, us humans, and all this that we think life now is but an afterlife. How else to account for the ridiculous preponderance of coincidence, the déjà vu, the way what books we read constantly prefigure our everyday concerns,…”
“…the lives of the Titans as it were, the huge heroic people we were each before we were woken by death and birth into this becalmed shore of suburban banality, a domain one might say of air-freshener and furniture polish, of broken dreams and haemorrhoid creams,…”
“So why shouldn’t Buddhist reincarnation and Christian damnation and all the other tosh be rated as equal tosh with all other tosh, fragments of a jigsaw of tosh…”
Yes, I do have “a blog one can follow…”
—> Page 32
“I say we are all asleep, and only art can wake us up for a few mad moments each day.”
I must have been asleep when I read those words yesterday in this book, but now I am awake to the fact that this book should indeed wake me up with its art upon each day that I pick it up to read it in the future. Slow, savoured, textured, eked-out, my reading of this rich prose, with many internal rhymes by the Rhymer and many internal assonances by the Assonancer…
So that I do not issue any plot spoilers, the only reference to the plot I shall make is this photocopy of these words from the book’s cover:-
Oh, I would add that Nadith in Suburbia seems to have a brother called Zenir currently in Industria, or so I infer. Nadir and Zenith?
—> Page 34
We meet John Joyce.. A Finnegans Gardener. Planting early seeds?
I intend to read the rest of this book’s 200 pages outside the scope of my public real-time reviewing. I fully expect them to maintain — and constructively extrapolate upon — the promise of tenor I have already observed above.
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