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/
My review in 2015 of the complete stories of Clarice Lispector:
From the ‘fits and starts’ of The Uncanny to the ‘cuts’ of Cixous, I hope I am a ‘creative reader’, too!
Royle: “To read Cixous: cut off into another thinking of space and time and history. Her writing is a new kind of science fiction or poetic science criticism.. It has to do with nanoments, narratoids, omniscience and ornithophony, with ‘literature’ as a land as much of the ancient past as of the unforeseeable future.”
[See my gestalt review of SOLAGE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/solage-nimbus-ashley/ ]
My review in 2015 of Edgar Allan Poe’s LIGEIA:
****
LIGEIA
“Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. — JOSEPH GLANVILL.”
A sumptuous, rhapsodically textured text, deceptively ‘slender’ or agile like Ligeia herself perhaps when in full health, but decadently and morbidly tapestried throughout otherwise. Like Ligeia, there is a ‘strangeness’ in this text but one that is hidden in Plain Sight, like Poe’s purloined letter earlier. But, here, it is the Sight itself, her eyes, the most thrilling eyes in all literature, I claim — followed in time’s due accretion by a “Saracenic” tapestried undulance, a literally textured vision of her soul wrestling with shadow… In the end, the Eyes Have It, the Eyes Have It. Eyes with the glance of pervasive foreign, oriental cultures…
A subsuming of one’s second false love with a revivification by one’s first true love. The hope of transcending Death through the narrator’s (or is it Ligeia’s?) wilful amorality? Like today’s battling Saracenic wills in Iraq and Syria? That Conqueror Worm? Poe at his undidactic best. Or with a didacticism hidden in Plain Sight?
cf ‘The Giaour’ by Lord Byron, about Leila… This review of mine seems to be the very first connection between ‘The Giaour’ and ‘Ligeia’. Poe was a fan of Byron. And there are similar Islamic connections in ‘The Giaour’ (and, by the way, a vampire)…
Royle calls some of ‘Ligeia’ revelirious writing and also states:
“Cixous encourages us to ‘write by dream’. This injunction or solicitation would concern the composition not only of poems or plays or works of fiction but also of critical essays.”
Ah.
My review of THE WAVES by Virginia Woolf:
My reviews of the complete fiction of ELIZABETH BOWEN:
“…Nick, you were a mole.”
— Hélène Cixous
CONTENTS PAGE OF THIS ROYLE BOOK:
Siouxsie Sioux, must listen.
My review of a story importantly including PSALM CIX…