Lift Your Right Arm

by Peter Cherches

The five sequences of Lift Your Right Arm are minimalist novels of sorts--thought-provoking, mostly deadpan prose that is often darkly humorous. From the stark relationship studies of "Bagatelles" and "Dirty Windows" to the wry observations of "Mr. Deadman" and "A Certain Clarence," the stars of these pieces are Peter Cherches' unique takes on Everyman and Everywoman--dead or alive--navigating a world in which very little is what it seems.

"One of the innovators of the short short story, Cherches (Condensed Book) returns with a collection whose pieces linger in the void somewhere between poetry and prose. Consisting of five sequences of loosely connected minimalist stories--few of which go on for longer than a page--these 'novellas', though distinct, keep returning to certain overarching themes: the reality of death, the difficulty of expressing subjective perspective, and the failures of language." - Publishers Weekly

“Packed into Lift Your Right Arm are conundrums, Abbott-and-Costello dialogues, nonsense narratives and other playful—sometimes hilarious, sometimes subversive—assaults on logic. To Gödel, Escher, and Bach we might consider adding Peter Cherches.” - Billy Collins

“Peter Cherches is one of the stingiest writers going—stingy with words, that is. He won’t use ten words if he can get away with five, and he won’t write a novel if he can convey its pith in a page. This book, then, is the equivalent of a whole shelf of books. Read slowly, it can last you for years.” - Luc Sante

Genres: Short Stories

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2013

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first minimalist novel/micro-fiction in this collection, Mr. Deadman, is thirty short chapters long, each chapter taking up no more than half a page, featuring, well, no surprise, Mr. Deadman.

In the first chapter, Pushing Up Daisies, we read: “You can’t keep a dead man down. Six feet under is six feet too many.”

Turns out, Mr. Deadman plans a getaway, starts working out right there in his cramped coffin, push-ups and sit-ups, until he’s ready to burst through the wood into the dirt, up, up, right up to the surface where he literally pushes up the daisies.

Each subsequent chapter features a different episode, a unique reflection, a new adventure, for example: Mr. Deadman at the sushi bar; Mr. Deadman takes a holiday; Mr. Deadman visits a nail salon; Mr. Deadman dances the dance of death; Mr. Deadman tries to keep up with the Joneses; how Mr. Deadman doesn’t like being called a stiff.

Offbeat combination of farce, satire, screwball, eccentric humor, black humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, dry humor and deadpan humor (no pun intended). Actually, I love it. I’ve read this Peter Cherches micro-fiction at least a dozen times.

I’d send a serious letter of recommendation to the Nobel committee with this book enclosed but I fear those sober Swedes would take my communique as so much morbid, screwball, black humor.

With Bagatelles, the title of the next micro-tale, we are given twenty-five brief trifles, telling details part of an intense yet amusing relationship between a man and a woman. Each bagatelle is no longer than a half page and black humor remains on stage but steps aside as situational humor takes the spotlight, front and center. And it is the man who does the telling with such quirkiness and precision of language that I am obliged to quote a quartet of these bizarre bagatelles in their entirety lest I bend, crack, twist or break their delicate, warped kink:

“She was a constant. I used her to gauge reality. The world existed for me in relation to her. For instance, I used her as a standard for temperature. For the sake of convenience, I called her body temperature zero. For us to be comfortable, room temperature had to be considerably below zero. And when she had a fever it had to be even colder.”

“I said something that she obviously misinterpreted, because she reacted angrily. She was screaming in a frenzy. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I let her go on until she ran out of steam. When I was sure she was through, I repeated my original statement. She must have understood this time because she said, oh yes, now I understand.”

“Sniffing each other was our favorite pastime. We would produce various and sundry odors for each other’s benefit. Some of our odors were mutual, but certainly not all. She produced many odors that I could not duplicate, and vice versa. We spent many pleasant hours producing odors for each other. When we became familiar with each other’s repertoire of odors, we began to make requests. It was pure ecstasy. When we were sniffing each other nothing else mattered. We had each other, and as far as we were concerned, who cared how the world smelled.”

“We tried to put each other into words. But words weren’t enough. So we put each other into sentences. No good. Paragraphs. Unsatisfactory. Chapters. Not quite right. A book. Books. Volume upon volume upon volume. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing was enough, everything was too much.”

The next mini-tale in the queue is Dirty Windows, a somewhat similar quizzical spin on a man and a woman, only this time they just did meet at a bookstore where she was thumbing through Finnegans Wake and he said “Nice weather.”

She took an instant liking to him since she was a meteorologist. Trio Bagatelles likewise highlights situational humor and gallows humor with a touch of epigrammatic humor and parodic humor seasoned in, a tale where three people interact in a kind of post-modern, eccentric spin-off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Oh, and the sexes of these three are not given – you as reader can designate as you see fit.

Alas, we come to the last tale in this collection. Julio Cortázar had his A Certain Lucas and Peter Cherches has his A Certain Clarence, twenty-one peculiar adventures of a very charming but very peculiar man. How peculiar? Here’s the first adventure – piquant, provocative, provoking, and, of course, perversely peculiar:

“Clarence decided to paint his room. It was a small room, and Clarence reasoned that he could create the illusion of more space if he were to paint his room the colors of outside. So he painted his ceiling blue like the sky, with a couple of white clouds for good measure. He painted his floor in patches of green and brown, like grass and earth. And his walls he painted no color at all.”



Peter Cherches - micro-tale teller, performing artist, kazooist - one unique voice on the contemporary literary scene.

[Mike Heyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

The five sections in this book are filled with wry observations that reveal a profund perceptiveness of human psychology, a close familiarity with the perversity of humor, and a profound love of wordplay. In "Mr. Deadman" Peter Cherches, exploring life from the unique (or not so unique) perspective of a deceased person who persists in the activities of daily living, undertakes every deadly pun imaginable. In "Bagatelles" he offers the distilled essences of conversations and shared actions that reveal the aloneness of two people in their being together. Later, in "Trio Bagatelles," he ups the ante by a factor of three. Clearly this is a writer not to be trifled with. His is a mind mapped by Escher dispensing its thoughts in Möbius strips. One can readily imagine him doing stand-up routines in a day club on the twilight world of Rigel 7. Yesterday I encountered by chance an old acquaintance named Clarence; today I read the last section of this book entitled "A Certain Clarence." No doubt Mr. Cherches would make something of this. These often humorous fictions are so true they make you wonder if sometime, somewhere, they may actually have happened. If one day Mr. Cherches applies his insights and word skills to weaving a narrative tale the story will be well worth reading.

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, clever, frequently hilarious, often insightful. This fun collection of weird vignettes is brief because it doesn't need to be longer. With five sections each made up of pithy 1-2 page 'chapters', Cherches maximizes the power of each word, and clearly values the artistry of writing as much or more as that of story. That is not to say that it is formless by any means. Each section is a succint self-contained narrative, each focusing on different themes and characters and applying different techniques to illustrate them.

I liked all five sections, but my two favorites were Mr Deadman and Trio Bagatelle. They best convey Cherches' playful and dry sense of humor.

Mr Deadman brought to mind the Mexican Dia de los Muertos tradition of writing "calaveras" (literally skulls). This term refers both to the illustrations of skeletons usually in very normal, mundane, living settings as well as the poems which accompany them. The poems are playful, happy celebrations of death as a being and as an event. Contrary to popular belief, this tradition in no way indicates Mexican culture is less fearful of death and dying than anyone else in the world. Nor is it, in my opinion, a coping mechanism. I believe this artform just is. Likewise, by creating a dead character which experiences and re-experiences multiple deaths and still exists among the living, I think Cherches is first and foremost creating a character that just is. The humor and the insight come from essentially reversing the conditions of life and death in the form of Mr Deadman, His adventures mimic our own daily life, but for the slight, discomforting fact that Mr Deadman is dead.

Trio Bagatelle is paradoxically the most minimalist section while also being the most generous in its economy of words. Written as a series of dialogues between characters one, two, and three, it aims at both Abbot & Costello-esque comedy routines and subtle, revelatory insights into friendships, relationships, the absurdity of being, and the fun of it. It makes me wonder what Beckett would have done if he wrote for Vaudeville. Unlike Beckett, there's no sense of angst in these stories. If there is, it quickly gets cast aside by the literary cathartic shrug of the shoulders usually in the form of a punchline.

I would never judge a work by its cost-length ratio, but I know many people do. I'll say this: it can be read very quickly in one sitting (many, if you're slow like me) or enjoyed piece by piece over a longer period of time. It can be re-read bcause the multi-layered humor works well, and the stories never overstay their welcome. It does definitely ask of the reader to exercise a different sort of sensibility than that of conventional short stories (many of which are just very brief novels). I guess I must be adept at that, because it definitely works for me.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

At most banquets the hors d'oeuvre are the best part, concentrated packets of taste that explode in the mouth, tantalize the palate, and fill the nostrils with a craving for more. Such is the case with the enigmatic short prose of Peter Cherches collected in his new book "Lift Your Right Arm." It's pickled in dry wit and wry humor, peppered with memorable one-liners, and salted with a biting attitude that flirts with, but never succumbs to cynicism, as in the penultimate piece in the series about a living dead man. Here it is in its entirety: "Mr. Deadman pays a visit to his favorite scenic spot, a steep, perilous cliff. Mr. Deadman loves to walk up to the edge and peer over. Every time he sees something different." There's an unlikely lyricism when you least expect it: "He was dreaming that she was telling him that if he didn't stop dreaming about her she would wake him up when he woke her up." And venom too: "I created you out of nothingness and I can annihilate you any time I feel like it, I told her. I'd like to see you try, she said." This is followed by two blank numbered pages with footers to frame the absence. Mark Twain was said to have been able to keep an audience captivated for a full fifteen minutes on stage with silence. Peter Cherches can do it in two blank pages. This slender tome concludes with a story about a man who finds a big fat book about his life, "his entire life, down to the most minute detail." At first he is amazed and enthralled. But when he buys it and takes it home, disappointment sets in. There is nothing about tomorrow, literally nothing. Just the back cover. "Lift Your Right Arm" obliges an otherwise passive reader to fill in the blanks. So go ahead and buy this book! Take it home and put it on your night table for savory late night literary tidbits. If your dreams run dry, Mr. Cherches will refill the well.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure how to characterize this book of short teasing bites that are wrapped around five different vignettes existentially covering love, relationships, death, time, life, self and self-delusions. Some pages consist only of a sentence, others paragraphs but they are composed with a queer, cheeky, whimsical, kooky, dusky, museful wit. Through wisecrack repartee, raillery, sometimes slippery musings, I found myself halting in double takes throughout the pages. Poetic prose in ruminative, earnest bites for repeated consumption. Keep at the bedside when in a playful mental mood.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was quite entertaining. Full of witty "stories" and a unique way of presenting them. I would recommend this to anyone with a short attention span and who likes a nice, unique, easy read.

[Cail Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Deadman, long may he live.

[Susan Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant minimalist novel, my review is on www.notanotherbookreview.blogspot.com

[Jan Moens · Rating 5 out of 5]

8,5/10