Across My Big Brass Bed

by Gary Amdahl

“Gary Amdahl is a language-obsessive with a dead-on feel for the almost bodily pulsations of sense-making, what Robert Frost called “sentence sounds,” the shapes that uncannily anticipate the meanings we fill them with. He is, to boot, a free-wheeling—a whirling—diviner of associations. When the prose is on you don’t need a night-light.” --Sven Birkerts

"Amdahl is one whose gifts are staggering and hard won. The stories relate, by the way of guts through grace, the wholeness of a novel too good for philosophy. Gary Amdahl knows sports, men, women, and dogs, thank God, so thoroughly as to make them myth. Camus comes to mind, thought with great muscle." --Barry Hannah

430 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2014

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This'll put you through the ringer all right. But you'll come through, battered and bruised, but gleaming. Review to come.

[Josh Doughty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm…

If I were to blurb this gentleman, it would go like this:

“Across My Big Brass Bed - An Intellectual Autobiography in Twenty-four Hours takes place in an America beginning in/around the Kennedy assassination and with that, going forward, is a memoir of sorts yielding a Proustian introspection women should pay attention to in the same way men should pay attention to Ferrante.”

I don’t want to believe the Norman Mailer comparison, but it pretty much is. Chronically wanting to put his dick in or around every woman around him. Only difference, up to a certain point I feel, is in the narrators teenage life. With that being said, underground man tropes aside(?), the sentences blow Mailer out of the water.

What you will get outside of the fuckboy’s plea are existential wall of text prose, car races, pole vaulting, janitorial cleansing, flute playing, and so much more.

Shut up and drive. And do drugs.

Will be reading more Amdahl soon and happens to be the only book I enjoyed in the month of December.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last one hundred pages were compelling, but I lost sight of why things were happening and at times what was happening. In the final fifty or sixty pages, characters from the beginning returned more frequently, and that heightened the unity of the novel and gave me greater grasp on the book. It is possibly my personal circumstances, and nothing to do with the book, that made it more challenging toward the end. This novel has a lot from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota--Dinkytown gets more than one mention--as well as other regions. Subjects include classical music, motorbike racing, 1960s culture, the Vietnam War, and much more. I highly recommend you check out Gary Amdahl's Across My Big Brass Bed and other titles from Corona\Samizdat Press.

[John A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amdahl is a master wordsmith, and each page, a painting of a man’s progress through existence. This is one hell of a read.