ELSEWHEN PRESS, 2014
My previous reviews of Douglas Thompson here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/douglas-thompson/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
“Whatever I do or say, or don’t do or say, do forgive me…” (Elizabeth Bowen) — A fearless faith in fiction — Various passions of the reading moment — Always using purchased books — And if future time allows…
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
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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