Absolute Away

by Lance Olsen

With Lance Olsen’s signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring’s lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived—Edie’s gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart.



Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense—about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 16, 2024

About the author

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.

Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute Away is a sorrowful novel… The title implies death… Grim Reaper comes without invitation…
The little girl is not yet three years old… Her world is full of magic…

Traveling in her father’s arms has always meant elation for Edie, a tram or bus ride an atlas of benevolent surprises. Traveling in his arms means anything is possible, which means maybe this evening her parents and she will cross the gauzy borders separating humans from fairytales, step inside a hut made of Christmas cookies and raspberry icing where Edie’s porcelain doll Eva with real blonde hair has invited them to tea, in the garden of which bunnies and nymphs play dominos made from shortbread on the banks of a brook flowing with liquid moonlight.

But the place and time are wrong… It’s the year 1933 in Berlin… The night of burning books in the university square… 
In the next part Jackson Pollock goes for a ride… The last one… Jack the Dripper and two girls…

– love, no matter what the terms, no matter how differently you define it from everybody else –
– it has its ups and downs, sure, look at Jackson and me, but you know in your bones it’s its own reward –

The third part is about old age… Faulty health and faulty memory… Faulty reality…

That fight to get Helen back from the Trojans lasts a full decade, only to be followed by Odysseus failing to reach Ithaca for another after that, over which time his crew is killed off and he himself reduced to an impoverished nomad, someone who has fallen so far off the radar that no one – including himself – knows where or who he is anymore.

Time is the most powerful destroyer.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once again Olsen has multiple tracks to his narrative about various incarnations of Edie Metzger

The book is in 3 sections.

The 1st has the infant Edie present at the Nazi book burning in Berlin in the 1830s

In the 2nd she's a young woman in the backseat of a car driven by Jackson Pollock in 1956

I found these 2 sections the most successful parts of the novel.

The 3rd (and lengthiest) has Edie/Eddy at various stages of his/her life as gender changes also occur. This final section was more fragmentary and confusing

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/Ff65iEk5684

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second Lance Olsen book this year or ever, and I'm now a huge fan of his writing and the way his stories build from an experimental structure. The writing can seem abstract at times, but the fragmentary approach is often similar to poetry, but poetry that is diving deep into what it means to be human, to experience loss or to be lost, and aging, existence, miracles, death, etc etc etc. Looking forward to reading more of his work.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life only appears linear because we re-constitute time as it unfolds while wading across Heraclitus' river. The river is an illusion. This book works against the normative story telling perspective. My favorite fiction falls into this kind of rule breaking storytelling. This book is definitely worth a look see for those who realize there is no story about the story and the world reveals itself as we look at distant points not part of the foreground.