Reperfusion

by Andrew Hodgson

Set in nightmarish Black Stump, a Northern English port town sometime in the mid-20th century, Reperfusion builds the story of a place and people from the blank page word by word like so many bricks in an artifice. The story centres on the character of Albert, and follows him in a single day in his life. He begins his day like every other in a greasy spoon cafe before heading to work at the docks, however he becomes aware of the presence of two people following him, the narrator and the reader, who, embodied in the text, increasingly impose themselves on his everyday life. It is not long before Albert begins to realise their intentions for him, and that this day may not only be his last, but his first, his only and his every.

The reader is welcomed in to the book by the narrator, who while seemingly beginning the story with the best intentions in turn builds up and pulls away the facade of truth, character, plot and narrative itself. The narrator passes himself off as the king within his realm weaving strands of story about the streets of Black Stump, lambasting the ever growing presence of the spectre of a writer figure, before these strands join, tie up, fray and disintegrate. A disintegration leaving the blank space from which a place and life was created, and closing the loop on a 24 hour reality which exists in the twilight between the real and nothing.

Reperfusion is a discussion on the roles of all those involved in fiction, characters, narrators, writers, readers. And the play between truth and lies which makes a book a living thing in symbiosis with its host, the reader. As the narrator himself says,

“As an object, this book by its very nature is frigid and unresponsive. However, by process of reperfusion the blood seeps from your finger tips and in to these pages. Flushing life through these stale words and names. And before you know it it's become part of your circuit. It's part of you, sitting up there among the malice and disappointment. Feeding your id.”


Reperfusion, noun - the restoration of blood flow to an organ which is devoid of blood.

170 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2012

About the author

Andrew Hodgson (b. Hull, 1988) is author of the novel Reperfusion (WPS&B, 2012), the monograph The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945 – 1975 (Bloomsbury, 2019), and editor of the experimental writing collection Paris (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). He is translator from the French of Roland Topor’s Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne (Atlas Press, 2018) and from the Danish, Carl Julius Salomonsen’s New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness (New Documents, 2020). He is Professeur of Humanities and Social Sciences in English at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Reviews

[Trutze]

this sounds really interesting to read :)