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/
With over 60 pages between stiff luxurious boundaries, or rather two sets of over 30 pages each (one set in English, the other in Portuguese, as alternative renditions of the same works), my copy — a disarmingly dizzy topsy-turvy tête-bêche of an ‘Ace Double’ — is numbered by hand: 04/40.
Sown with designs.
First off…
SNOW by Justin Isis
”…he felt as though he were reading a novel rather than the news.”
The story features the man Hiroki and his relationship with others from two families (with children) as part of a nuclear family in one household with he and his lover as ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ I could easily have misinterpreted this situation, but I was intrigued with one child’s accident soiling himself at school (I know the humiliated feeling by dint of a distant memory!) and the home toilet later getting blocked (a phobia of mine!)
Much, too, on algebra, the nature of some gloves, midges looking like eyelashes, and more.
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My contribution to understanding the Isis story…
“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
THREE INVISIBLE STORIES by Songling Pu
Translated by Herbert A. Giles (1880)
The Magic Path, A Dwarf, The Butterfly’s Revenge
“Come along! just room for one more; you’re in the nick of time.”
A healing luminous invisibility as a form of translucency: just discerning a group of literati under the moon welcoming Kuo to its close-knitted group. The irony, as a tall pillar of selves hawled up, only (only?) to become a horizontal path to walk upon towards the new transparency of death. Even a dwarf can be part of this adaptable ladder of endeavour, as righteous revenge against a foreshortened God who made him. Literati now as beautiful butterflies feeling vengeance against those who mock them, together with Songling birds, even parrots of rote, all ever part of literary patterns in rebellion — a battle as gestalt, alongside Gaia, against God as Man who is just one vital swallow short of panacea, “…cured, but unable to obtain the proper prescription.”
end