Fra Keeler

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness.

A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Novella, Iran, Literary Fiction, American, Novels

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2012

About the author

Awards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Whiting Awards, 5 Under 35

Education: Brown University, University of California San Diego
Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging Author

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.

Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

The moment of our greatest impulses is the moment of our greatest failure.

In the recent Twilight Zone remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, the closing narration cautions that the investigative reporter in the story “was unwilling to investigate himself until it was too late”. Fra Keeler, the Whiting Award winning first novel by the extraordinarily talented Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, follows a similar cautionary message as an unnamed narrator moves into the home of the recently deceased Fra Keeler to investigate his death but finds himself spiraling into his own fractured investigations and mental digressions. ‘Some deaths are more than just a death,’ the narrator tells us from the start, and as their investigation moves inward we become trapped in their ruminations on death, time, and war amongst other themes, failing to question the narrator’s motives as much as he fails to question his own. Oloomi’s novel has scant plot to float upon but more than enough on a linguistic tapestry to catch the winds and propel the reader forward along the disturbed waves of narratorial thought. The narrator is clearly suffering from serious mental illness but their stream of consciousness engulfs the reader into its violent deterioration. We are captives, unmoored from reality with an unwell captain at the helm and our best chance at survival is to comply, which is made easier as the narrator is, in fact, a rather empathetic and charismatic being. This novel is not a glorification of mental illness, however, but a firm cautionary wake-up call to the way authors have captured the sick fascination with the subject for storytelling purposes. Drawing on--and putting a twist on--a rich literary tradition of unreliable narrators and mental illness, Oloomi defty sends us unraveling hand-in-hand with the narrator on a collision course towards a conclusion we inevitably feel complicit in for not seeing the warning signs.

This is how one lives against one’s dying.

Oloomi has a fantastic grasp on prose, managing to accrue tension and dread on language alone. This short novel is also short on plot--the narrator wanders the house, hangs out in a yurt that may-or-may-not travel through time and space, is visited by a mailman and an Ancestory.com representative, takes a walk in the canyon and visits the neighbor, but not much else--but does not feel lacking despite it. Instead we feel plunged into a pure stream of language like a cosmic nebula collapsing in on itself. In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Oloomi states that ‘Fra Keeler is a novel of unbuilding, of decomposition’. ‘The sentences pile up and on revealing small changes that aggregate into a critical mass,’ she says, ‘ in other words, the reality of the novel is revealed through the accumulation of language’. And what a dramatic reveal it is. As we begin to reach the terrifying conclusion, the narrator thinks ‘I wanted to cup my hands around the stars, pluck them out of the sky once and for all,’. This line recalls W.H. Auden’s closing stanza from Funeral Blues:

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Considering the concluding line of the poem, the narrators frustration is a clear warning for impending disaster but since we are so swept up in the flow of their mind that we are either willingly believing the narrator’s intentions or simply too caught up to fear what is coming.

However, this is getting ahead of itself. Oloomi is clearly well-read and drawing from an incredible pool of inspiration--the notable works of fiction and film that inspired the novel are listed in the acknowledgements and form a perfect to-read list including Roberto Bolaño, Knut Hamsun, Clarice Lispector, Max Frisch, André Gide, and Anna Kavan, among many others. The influences are apparent, yet the book feels wholly original with the influences serving as a backdrop of intensive research instead of literary crutches. The most notable theme shared by the influential works listed are the ways novelists have captured the awe of readers through unreliable narrators that make us complicit in their deeds. When reading Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky manages to make the reader feel as if they, themselves, had a hand in the murder. In Hamsun--particularly Hunger--we often overlook the narrator’s beastly qualities because we are so enamored by their charisma. Bolaño’s By Night in Chile has a similar effect of keeping the reader trapped in the narrator’s apathy towards political violence until that violence comes literally screaming through a party. Most notable, however, is Humbert Humbert and the way Nabokov plays games with his readers. It seems a formula of drawing the reader into the grotesque by making us victims of the narrator’s apparent madness, keeping us captive by drawing on a long history of social conditioning much like what feminist scholar Kate Manne has termed “himpathy”: “ Inappropriate sympathy given to male perpetrators of violence” (from Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny). As a society, we tend to put more stock in how a male perpetrator is being affected rather than the impact on their victims. As in Lolita, Oloomi creates a damaged male protagonist to whom we are tricked into giving empathy instead of criticizing their violence or treatment of women (the woman with the burned face, the Ancestory.com representative, the old neighbor woman are all treated as nothing but annoyances and we hardly detect the supreme violence underneath).

Oloomi draws us in to close proximity to a narrator we know is damaged and suffering from PTSD, but his humor--this book is quite funny--is infectious, as is his hatred for the mailman or his joys when walking in the canyon (one can’t help but smile with the narrator with outbursts of joy like ‘I had seen a bir, a stream, a sparrow, slept leaning against a rock listening to the sound of trickling water. What more could a person want?’). A mere five pages in and the narrator admits ‘But no: I lied. To be fair, I omitted, I didn’t lie’ which raises an immediate red flag that the story is framed by a mind that will lie, or omit, but invites you to still trust them because at least they admitted they lie. This recalls a similar unreliable narrator technique used in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden, an overt narrator speaking directly to you--as does our narrator in Fra Keeler--confesses ‘I am the most terrific liar you ever say in your life’ and frames the novel right from paragraph one by admitting he will tell you only what he wants you to know. Right away, certain omission such as the narrator’s name, or that his connection to Fra Keeler is never even hinted at, become sign posts that you, the reader, are being groomed by the narrator as misdirection from the truth. What is doubly interesting, though, is that the narrator, too, is victim to certain omissions like blanks between events (the narrator often finds that large chunks of time have passed or that they are suddenly in a new location, unsure how they arrived) and breaks from reality due to their mental condition. The grasp on reality becomes even more futile and we are plunging into the madness with a damaged mind as our parachute.

Death, I thought, wars, it is all the same thing,

There are a few clues to the narrator’s mental state and most signs point towards severe PTSD. Several times a woman--who he confuses with his mother if you want to consider some Freudian aspects--appears in the narrator’s dreams, points to her face disfigured by acid, and tells him ‘you did this’. The narrator denies it but is constantly haunted by her. His musings on death often lead to thoughts about war, or refering to the lighting in a room as being like the light of war, a cop smoking a cigarette while his head is buzzing from a blow makes him recall ‘the smell of burning flesh. I remembered the mosquitos buzzing everywhere, settling on the corpses’. A fascination with death, and his distrust for it--as evinced by the distrust over Fra Keeler’s death records--appears to be deeply rooted in an experience of war, a theme that also largely influences Oloomi’s second novel, Call Me Zebra. The narrator perceives time and events as a chaotic mess all tied together and spiraling towards inevitable death and that our lives are at war with death.

That is all [war] is: a mass of people walking like sheep towards their own death. The whole world, I thought, full of decrepit corpses. Because war is everywhere, I thought. The war in our brains, and actual wars: over land, and by sea, and even through the air above land, I thought, because one way of killing isn’t enough, one gets bored of it…

The narrator despises war and, likely, his own participation in it as well as our sick fascination as a species with violence. In a way, Oloomi is teasing the reader for their own fascination with madness and violence and how the two are staples for literature and marketing a book. This becomes another method of building empathy for the character and asking us to reflect on that to gloss over that he committed actual war crimes.

Just as thoughts bleed into thoughts, events run amuck, in the most disorganized state.

The unreliability of time is another important aspect which Oloomi uses for framing the novel. The quick aside ‘I must retrace’ that appears early in the first chapter signifies that what follows is all a flashback, cleverly obfuscating where the opening scene would be in the novel’s timeline. Time and its unreliability are a common point of contention for the narrator, at one point claiming ‘the present’ is a lie and doesn’t exist:

There is only the moving forward of events and the moving backwards of one’s understand over those events. To say there is a present, I thought, is to say there is a platform where events accumulate and then stop happening so one can evaluate their effect. It is what people do, I thought, feed themselves lies. Everything is a lie in the first instance. Then the lie is purified, smoothed out, turned into a truth, because the present is always cycling into the past, or transforming into a future moment…

The fractured narrative becomes, in effect, an example of the narrators considerations of time and the reader must question if events are flowing correctly. Occasionally events recur or become meshed into a ball such as when the narrator is looping through a succession of phone calls interrupting each other only to break the phone which, later, has yet to have been broken. The repeated ‘I thought’ that punctuates the sentences is our constant reminder that it is a story being told in the past although the narrator seems to be reacting with befuddlement to the events in real-time.

The ending is a wild ride, suddenly confronting both the narrator and reader with reality like a blow to the head and reframing the entire novel in fresh context. In the Borge’s story A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain, Quain is said to have written a fictional detective novel where the detective comes to a logical conclusion and arrest based on perceived evidence but the novel’s final line reframes the context of the whole book so the reader must immediately re-read it and use the new context to deduce the true killer on their own. Fra Keeler is not quite as elaborate in execution, but does well to embody this idea as a second reading of the novel is practically needed to really unlock the mystery. The final few pages make the reader realize they have been following the narrator’s perception of events and not paying attention to the signposts of reality the novels circular narrative is zigzagging around. If I may spend a moment discussing it here: When the novel opens, we have a realtor sliding house papers to the narrator with an ‘unfriendly finger’ and at the conclusion we have the police office also sliding papers at the narrator with an ‘unfriendly finger’. As duplicity is a common theme in the novel--the narrative itself is deceptive, he remarks that ‘the duplicity of things is unbearable’ after musing on his reflection in the skylight, he calls tree’s duplicitous, the term is practically a refrain in the book--the doubling of the finger both bookends the narrative while also revealing a looping in the timeline. The pistol-whip is a wake-up call to the narrator but also the reader: nothing has been truthful and the opening scene is both its own thing but also the ending from a different point of view. Pages after the realtor scene the narrator says he must retrace, and the novel flashes back, presumably somehow both before and after the event of the realtor who may not even be a realtor but a police officer showing the narrator the death papers they found. ‘The death-related papers, I thought, forgery, murder, and then the lights went out in my head.’ Fra Keeler’s papers from the beginning--the ones with two different locations of death the befuddles the narrator--the reader is lead to assume, but why, then, is the officer questioning him about fearing his own death? ‘Because, I thought, wasn’t I already dead?’ he wonders to himself. Just then the yurt returns and he vanishes into it--possibly in his own mind returning back into the fractured time of the novel as if looping over and over the final few days looking for a clue as to what got him here. There is a case to be made that the investigation of Fra Keeler’s death is the investigation of his own death, that Fra Keeler both is and isn’t the narrator (doubling and duplicity again, much like the realtor/policeman, and the narrator beingFra Keeler would explain the lack of mention as to their relationship as well as why the novel is circular in order to understand the events preceding his own death). Is he trying to convince himself that he is not a monster, much the way he is trying to convince the reader even though we now know he is capable of multiple murders (the neighbor and the woman with the melted face--presumably the war?)? Fra Keeler investigating the death of Fra Keeler at the hands of the police, the 'forgery' death papers being shown to him so he knows they can cover up his murder. The ending is open to interpretation--a definite ending would be beside the point in a novel about the unraveling of language (the unsteadiness of the mind and its relation to language). ‘Some deaths can only be understood in relation to the events that proceed before them’ he says, early on, and the ending returns us to the beginning like a post-mortem ghost story--literally the story from the mind of a ghost--as it retraces the fragments of final days unstuck from time.

Life, I thought, and everything that goes with it, is nothing but trouble.

This is a book best read in a single sitting as the tension and creeping terror amalgamates into a final devastating blow. Like Bolaño, Oloomi piles detail upon detail like dirt being shoveled upon a coffin with muffled screams emitting from within. Reading it without break--it is quite short--allows the complaining effect from each turn of the screw to build a manic atmosphere and unsettle the reader, allowing them to be vulnerable and overcome by language. ‘Terror,’ thinks the narrator, ‘is a combined state’. In an interview with Oloomi, she mentions ‘If I could get the reader to identify with the singularity of the narrator’s consciousness, to be enraptured by it, then I could position the reader to question their own relationship to reality’. Part of the effect is being swept up and away in the novel. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a stunning writer and this first offering is a curious marvel and Dorothy Publishing Project was wise to include it in their already impressive catalog. This book manages to pull off all it's promises, which is quite a feat. She turns the history of mental illness in literature on its head, reminding us that it is tragic and painful and not something to be glorified. Across a fractured prose that spirals time and events into a whirlpool of bewilderment, Fra Keeler is a fascinating little gem of a novel about investigations both external and internal.

4/5

Everybody...is in the midst of an investigation. A certain project. And if not a project, then to say the least in the midst of probing their lives. Melding them, molding them, one way or another bending their lives, stacking their day, straightening their hours, one minute and then the next, lining their seconds up, pointing them in a very specific direction. Only no one will admit it…’

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

2019 UPDATE The author has won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Call Me Zebra! Congratulations.

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Fiction. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.
BLURBS: "Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling."--Robert Coover (!!!!!)
"Obsessive/delightful, FRA KEELER subtly elaborates on life's details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel's incidents pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language's bizarre disturbances. FRA KEELER is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer."--Lynne Tillman
"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Per Petterson. FRA KEELER is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how 'one lives against one's dying, ' and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!"--Michelle Latiolais
"In FRA KEELER a mind churns on itself, while reality--if it is reality--comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining."--Brian Evenson


My Review: You will never see an endcap at your local Buns and Nubile featuring, or even including, this weird little bagatelle. It won't be piled in pyramids at the Costco. I'd even be surprised if it was among the Staff Picks at BookPeople, Austin's excellent indie megastore.

It's too weird to be a commercial force. It's a short work, so it's not likely to be used by the hoity-toity to display their Good Taste and Erudition. (Cloud Atlas, 1Q84, I'm lookin' at you.) So who will buy and read this book?

Beats me all hollow, and I suspect the reason it was published by small-but-mighty Dorothy, a publishing project, is right there. Who's the audience for this piece? Me? I got it from one of my rich county's libraries. (I am consistently astounded and delighted by the sheer variety and quantity of oddball stuff at least ONE library in the county system will buy. Often two or three. It's a pleasure to hit the catalog and request a weirdo book like this one, and three days later go and fetch it.) I don't know if I'd have the courage to pick it up if I hadn't read some reviews, if it came to my wallet opening.

But back to this weird little item. It's an interesting way to tell a mystery story via the stream of consciousness of a fractured identity apparently having occasional psychotic breaks. The mailman's hand turns into a lobster, the previous owner of a home has a magically shifting death certificate from two widely separated countries in Europe where it would seem we are not, the dust on the skylight comes in for some heavy narrative scrutiny....

Doesn't that sound like a corking way to spend an afternoon?

Strangely enough it is. Van der Vliet Oloomi—now it's time for me to confess that I got this book at all because the author's name makes me laugh until my sides hurt, and I love saying it out loud to unsuspecting housies, the dog, the librarian even and I go out of my way to avoid talking to the sourpusses at my library—is a young Iranian-American MFA-havin' writer whose sinuous sentences are a pleasure to slither alongside, and a more surprising and unexpected compliment I have yet to give.

ROBERT COOVER yes that's right ROBERT COOVER, he who created the uberbrilliant book The Public Burning which if you haven't read don't confess your turpitude to me just go fix it by reading it, praises the book! A writer I had never heard of compares Van der Vliet Oloomi (heh) to Max Frisch...I can't even pronounce “Latiolais” and had never heard of her either, so I ordered up her collection of short fiction Widow: Stories and must say that I owe Van der Vliet Oloomi a huge debt of gratitude for introducing me to this terrific talent...he of the awful, misogynistic novel Montauk and the impenetrably ironic, archly “comic” I Am Not Stiller, which would cause me personally to go find this Latiolais person and belt her one if it were MY book she was insulting that way.

So the blurbs kinda-sorta made me do it. Tillman, Evenson, okay okay I'll read it I'll read it already. And I'm glad that I did, because now I'll be on the lookout for whatever Van der Vliet Oloomi comes out with next. She's got something to say. That makes her interesting to me. I hope to you, too.

But $16? I know that it's not that much money in the cosmic scheme of things, but as I'm not made of money (I appear to be made of anti-money judging by my bank balance which I don't have as I don't have enough money to keep in a bank according to the banks), I would not have made a purchase. Should I recommend that you make the purchase?

Yes. Yes, I should; rare is the discovery of a unique voice. The pleasures that await you within are worth the investment.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

My high hopes for this did not pan out. It starts out strong, laying an intriguing foundation of mystery. But construction never progresses past the stage of a maddening framework and eventually lies abandoned altogether beneath a tarp woven from the narrator's paranoia and his philosophical ruminations on life and death, neither of which I found particularly compelling subject matter. Were it not for the occasional (and successful) humor I'd deduct a star. Oloomi's list of literary influences at the end makes perfect sense, as there are glimpses of many of these writers in the text (e.g., Bernhard, Kertész, Chevillard, Redonnet, Lispector, Vesaas). Knowing this list in advance had been what led me to the book. And while the story itself did not work that well for me, Oloomi's style and use of language are good enough that I'd be willing to read her again. This being a first novel, she deserves some leeway.

[Michael Palkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark cerebral, inimitable deconstruction on madness that has the pacing of Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" in suturing the past with the future and showing that the present doesn't really exist. It brings this sensibility of multitudes into the realm of a investigation and ordinary events that seem to take on heinous ulterior sensibilities in the mind of the protagonist, who starts to echo The Tell Tale Heart after a while. In reference to the ways in which everything seems to unify, I am reminded of the Neil deGrasse Tyson comment recently (on Joe Rogan Experience #310)

"Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you'll see the entire future of the universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments, and you will emerge into another spacetime created by the singularity of the blackhole you just fell into?"

The book occasionally is comedic and is constantly full of intensity in its narrative

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange and intriguing little book. A man buys a house because he is obsessed with it's former owner, the deceased Fra Keeler. Who Fra Keeler is never really gets explained, nor does why the narrator is obsessed with his death. Supposedly investigating, there is an odd series of connections between a yurt in the yard, a mailman, ancestry.com, an old woman next door, meditations on life and death, and the narrator's skylight. Surreal is definitely a good word for this one. I have a feeling I'll like this even more the more I reread it, but for the moment I'm still trying to understand. Definitely some intriguing writing.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Then I thought, no. Another thought inched itself into my brain. A spear of reason. I thought, one has a choice, in life one can choose between a mind of reason and a mind of madness, and which of the two will allow me to make the quickest sense of the unfriendly events?

Fra Keeler was the debut novel by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.

I came to it via the Global Bernhard page of the University of Vienna: 'Global Bernhard' is the first project to systematically map and contextualize international responses to the work of Thomas Bernhard, offering digital access through translations, essays, and bio-bibliographical detail. More than 200 author entries showcase the broad spectrum of creative engagement—from subtle allusions and direct quotations to Bernhard-like characters, full-blown pastiches, and modernized adaptations.

Here the author cites Bernhard's The Loser and Three Novellas, but as part of a constellation of films and books without which her novel would not be possible which also includes works by César Aira; Attila Bartis; Roberto Bolaño; Luis Buñuel; Éric Chevillard; Brian Evenson; Max Frisch; André Gide; Jean-Luc Godard; Nikolai Gogol; Witold Gombrowicz; Knut Hamsun; Alfred Hitchcock; Anna Kavan; Imre Kertész; Abbas Kiarostami; Jim Krusoe; Patrice Leconte; Doris Lessing; Clarice Lispector; Jean-Pierre Melville; Marie Redonnet; Eric Rohmer; Daniel Paul Schreber; Muriel Spark; Magdalena Tulli; Lynne Tillman; Tarjei Vesaas; and Diane Williams.

A list that if anything only made me more eager to read the novel - and it did not disappoint, the author taking all of these influences but producing an intense, yet blackly comic work.

The narrator is ostensibly trying to understand the death of a man Fra Keeler (the connection between them never explicit), who reportedly died of lung cancer, and to do so buys the deceased's house, a death conveniently timed to avoid various “unfriendly events.”

But while they start with a seemingly straightforward investigation - although one that immediately has one oddity, with two death certificates suggesting Fra Keeler died in two different places in Europe, the Netherlands and Palma de Mallorca - their thought patterns soon turn inwards, their perception of reality unravelling - a story that features a realtor with a ugly finger; a postman whose hand turns into a lobster claw; a mysterious yurt in the back garden; persistent interruptions from Ancestry.com staff; a canyon either bucolic or (according to the realtor) threatening; a obsession with skylights, both inextricable and interminable; a recurring dream of the narrator's mother with a melted face; a neighbour who may either be a sweet old woman and/or the mastermind tormeting the narrator; visions of wars; and more. All in a commendably brief work.

I walked to the curtains and split them open with my finger. I couldn’t just stand there any longer between the mirror and the bed. One is compelled to do something. To take advantage of the things that don’t make sense: the yurt, I thought, Fra Keeler, waking up in the bedroom as though all of a sudden. And to attempt to make sense in regards to all of this is senseless. Rather one must attempt to make senselessness. “Because senselessness,” I whispered to myself, “is sense at its peak, sense when it can no longer bare itself.” A flock of birds emerged from the top branches of the trees. They flooded the sky; the horizon disappeared behind their black bodies. It is a life I am retracing, I thought, as I watched the birds form a disc with their miniature bodies and fly back and forth between the trees. Then I remembered his wrist, his hand moving toward me soft as a dove in the yurt, disappearing. Fra Keeler, I thought, “Fra Keeler,” I whispered, moving my wrist in circular patterns through the air.

A novel that should be read, but which is hard to summarise, although s.penkevich's review does so brilliantly.

[Afi (WhatAfiReads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy shit what the heck did I just read :')

“So what a lie it is, the present, because it doesn’t even exist. There is only the moving forward of events and the moving backward of one’s understanding over those events."

There's something about this books that pulled me in and didn't let me get out.
We follow an unnamed narrator, searching for the answers to a murder of a man named Fra Keeler. As we go into the depths of the narrator's thoughts, the lines between reality and what is seemingly in the narrator's head blurred significantly. The author is one heck of a writer. The writing may not be for everyone but goddamn was I sucked into this and went spiraling with the narrator as well. It felt like everything and nothing is all real and fake; and you'll be wondering which one had really happened and what had eventually just happened in the narrator's head.

Reading this somewhat will challenge your sanity and it spoke out a variety of themes such as the insanity that comes with the depths of loneliness. A very intriguing read. I was sucked into it and came out a changed woman.

Personal Ratings : 4.25🌟

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thinking is pure misery, a job assigned to the miserable and the wretched, to think each thought to its horrible and suffocating end.

A failure to make sense of the chaos of details, events, and thoughts that comprise banal existence. In its sense of paranoid connectivity, Fra Keeler could be said to resemble The Crying of Lot 49, but instead of building mysterious certainties to be later undermined, this builds incoherent reflections from nothing and attempts to build to a startling climax from them. The results don't seem justifiably to follow from the lead-up, but perhaps this is precisely the point -- that violence is always an unjustified breach of continuity. Still, I'm reaching here, to find some points of coherency in an otherwise claustrophobic and rather maddening story.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mom accuses me of liking weird books. This is another one that will strengthen that argument.

Fragmented and more than a little bit strange, the narrative here starts with the narrator declaring that they will investigate Fra Keeler's death. Of course, he does no such thing. Instead things devolve into a very internal struggle for a narrator that doesn't interact with the world in a usual way (repeatedly the time of day is described obliquely - "Clearly the sun is at its zenith, I thought, because every minute it is getting warmer.")

There's a fair amount of paranoia, and through the whole tangled mess of the narration, the events become clear, and it isn't that hard to figure out what happened and why (although there are plenty of things left unresolved).

The book was short enough (it took me about an hour and a half) that it was fun to sit down and wrestle with the narrator. The ending was clear enough that it gave some reward as well.

[dkaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really intriguing book, reminded me at times of Kafka/Camus/Hamsun...pretty wild story. Would love to read another book by her.

[D.W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author rightly admits her indebtedness to Hamsun and Gide; the story's voice effects that same kind of vicarious immersion in fevered aporia - something run-of-the-mill Beach Readers might simply abandon to the DSM-V. I speak from my own experience; I admit, I wanted to put this book down a few times. At least twice. Reason was, I couldn't shake my gnawing contempt for yet another unappreciative cynic, lolling about in the affected ennui only relative abundance affords. What kept me going was twofold:
1) I'm attracted to Robbe-Grilletian perseverating. On objects, particularly - their properties and their (quasi-?)situatedness in imbricated space and time. It's a device I've always thought lends itself well to sculptural thinking (if that's a thing).
2) was it possible that Oloomi, an Iranian writer, grated against my defense of what Nick Land sums up as "one of the basic apologetic motifs of Occidental societies" : that "one has an immense amount to lose" in the first place? Was this book's semiconscious protagonist "unwittingly" rousting me from my own equally contemptible ethnocentric sleep?

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about madness, which makes it silly to try to tame it into a summary or review. As the jittery narrator says, “one cannot use reason to find events that are maddening” (87).

Frantic, manic, at turns funny, always wild. In addition to the slew of works the author acknowledges in a note at the end of the book, perhaps the closest pairing for this book and its style is Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Raskolnikov’s obsessive mind.

[Jennevieve Culver]

This is some Nathan Stewart type shit.

[Dustin Reade · Rating 4 out of 5]

a rambling, hallucinogenic story involving a mailman, a skylight, an old woman living in a dark house, ancestry.com, a clipboard, a yurt, a canoe, and the mysterious death of Fra Keeler.

This book was pretty different-y. At times it was almost impossible to decipher just what the hell was going on, but there were flashes of brilliance, too.

I like weird books, okay? That's just the way it is. So I liked it.

[Anne Earney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting first-person account of madness. Nothing is ever really explained, but the thoughts of the narrator are interesting to (attempt to) follow. And I suspect the list of books the author put at the end, which inspired her story, would make a great reading list on madness. Also, for some reason this book reminded me a little of Novel with Cocaine, although this one gives no indication of the madness being fueled by drugs.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 2 out of 5]

An arid entertainment by one and for those with an MFA in Creative Writing. (Or maybe I was just in a bad mood the afternoon I read it.)

[Richard Chiem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. I will return to this novel over and over again.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a pleasure to read. I found myself looping back around and rereading sections again and again so that I had read the book probably 4-5 times by the time I had read it once.

[Faye · Rating 5 out of 5]

general note: read anything and everything that Van Der Vliet Oloomi writes.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fra Keeler by Azardeen Van der Vliet Oloomi (she is Iranian American) packs a lot into its few pages. It begins when the nameless narrator moves into the former house of Fra Keeler, determined to investigate the latter’s death. It doesn’t take long to realise that the narrator’s view of reality is skewed, and the job of the reader then, is to pick out from what seem meaningless episodes, the clues as to where the story is headed. There is some welcome humour, which hold the attention, along with the puzzle of deciphering the almost hidden clues. At first the violent ending mystifies, but in retrospect is quite fitting, to this rather odd (in a pleasant way) little book. This is another from the Dorothy Project .

[David Bjelland · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's both crazy-sounding and, in a sense, literally/trivially true that everything that has ever happened has "led" to this moment; that "everything happens for a reason."

The first chapter of Fra Keeler suggests that it might set out to mine the terrain of detangling final, proximate, and distal causes (which is every bit as much a narrative question as it is an intellectual one), using paranoid schizophrenia as a cheeky framing device.

It's... well, it's not that.

Sometimes it feels like it wants to be a mystery, but there's not enough information to flesh out a puzzle worth solving.

Sometimes it's funny, but more often it's exhausting.

Mostly it's just this strange, deluded man, noticing the same banal details over and over again, imputing malicious causes to them, and then fainting.

Sensing perhaps that the reader is starting to get bored of all that, the author seems to sort of just throw up her hands and say "#&*$ it", tossing off a pointlessly violent ending and a heavy-handed "shattered glass as metaphor for broken psyche" image that she'd surely dock points for if one of her MFA students had used it in their own story for an assignment.

[Richelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

total weirdo!!! (complimentary)

[Faiza Sattar · Rating 2 out of 5]

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

A selections of favourite passages from the book

• The words peel off the page to sing brightly before my eyes. I must retrace.

• Certain words were illuminated by the light creeping through the window, and the rays of the light, firm as needles, were pointing out certain words to me, and I thought, this is a clue, this is a sign

• He turned to leave, a little less light in his eyes than when he had first announced himself, and I wondered, what have I done to deflate him? Just

• Thoughts, you walk through them, they exist before you, I told myself, picking the thought up again, and by some trick of the mind you think it was your thought

• because the realization that I could go to sleep not blind and wake up blind stirred in me a severe distrust

• Because when something happens once, I thought to myself, there is no telling that it will not happen again. Because that something has carved a pathway for itself in the world, regardless of consequence or prior event

• So what a lie it is, the present, because it doesn’t even exist. There is only the moving forward of events and the moving backward of one’s understanding over those events

• To say there is a present, I thought, is to say there is a platform where events accumulate and then stop happening so one can evaluate their effect. It is what people do, I thought, feed themselves lies. Everything is a lie in the first instance 

• Gathering of knowledge, I thought, is the only thing that makes the inevitability of one’s death worthwhile

• Because folded within the entrails of each event is its own consequence, a source for a future event

• I felt as though she could see through me, as though she was softening her voice to wrap around my sadness, because suddenly I had the distinct feeling of being transparent

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up not only because I'm trying to be a Dorothy Project completionist this year, but also because I love Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's second novel, Call Me Zebra. This is a very different novel than that one, and I'm trying to not let that cloud my judgement and react negatively. I don't think Fra Keeler is bad at all; it's a hazy fever dream of a novella that really focuses on an internalized narration. It's kinda a haunted house type thing, with the main character moving into Fra Keeler's old house after they died, and then a bunch of weird stuff happens. It's so mediated through the narration, though, that events slip through the reader's fingers with barely a sensation. I think this is by design, but the 120 pages just slipped away and I don't think I'll remember much of it in a month or two.

[Karyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure what I think about this book. It is, for sure, well-written. I enjoyed the way I felt sucked into the novel; when the protagonist saw himself on the ground in the rain, I too could feel the rain and smell the woods around me. But the book is very unusual and surreal, an examination of self and reality and the perception of time. It's a quick read, but I would guess I would have to read this more than once to really squeeze the full meaning from it.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very short read, but one that was actually a pretty good quick hit about madness and obsession and paranoia all rolled into one. Perhaps a little more abstract than it needed to be, but I found this to be an interesting read that might have been even more successful for me if it had a little more meat on its bones.

Still, with these Dorothy Project books, you're going to get something new and different and that's ultimately a good thing. Worth a look.

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick read, but I tend to like books with plots, so I wasn't that into it.

[Steve Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is pretty much an amazing ride from beginning to end. Perception shapes thought obsessively. Funny and dark.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's like a posthumous Thomas Bernhard novel.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A verbal descent to madness somewhere between evenson and lispector, but with never enough tension to quite sell the mood.